I really desperately need well-meaning gamers to stop assuming that the indie side of the industry doesn't have labor issues. Crunch is certainly very common in indie studios. Bad managers are common. Abuse and harassment do happen. Plenty of people have had experiences in indie game development that are just as bad what we hear about from the inside of big AAA studios, but we hardly ever hear about it.
Plenty of indie productions are shambolic disasters fueled by human blood, including some of games that you love. Plenty of people toil away in indie studios being underpaid or mistreated. Plenty of those games aren't even good.
Like yeah Bobby Kotick should be flayed alive or whatever, sure. But let me be real with you, plenty of indie studios are just run like a personal fiefdom and/or harem by some small business tyrant who got a loan from his dad. Plenty of indie studios are, spiritually, a scheme to pay off a steep debt incurred with a publisher by crunching some people into an early exit from the industry (or worse). Plenty of indie studios are shitty little cults of personality built around some guy who bullseyed the zeitgeist once.
Back in my early 20s I was roommates with a guy who'd graduated from the same game design program as me. I managed to land a design gig at a shitty local midsized mobile studio, while his first job out of school (his first actual job ever) was working for a guy who'd actually been one of our instructors as an artist/animator on his big indie magnum opus that he was bringing to Kickstarter.
I remember my roommate being run ragged. He worked so hard for so long on that shitheap Source engine shooter that the boss kept redesigning over and over. My roommate couldn't quit because this was the early 2010s and you were lucky to have ANY job in games, even if it was for a manipulative fuck who kept pressuring my roommate to consent to being paid in cash so he could cook his books come tax time (I at least managed to convince my roommate not to be accessory to fraud). My roommate wound up developing an extremely intense anxiety disorder - as in, he was having fucking seizures - and wound up having to move back in with his mom because he was too fucked-up from this experience to work. He destroyed himself for this dogshit game, for this massive egotist who didn't in any way deserve any of the loyalty he received (this boss would later go on to be obliquely implicated for his role in facilitating a certain prolific composer's pattern of abuse. Go figure!)
Watching my roommate go through that (and my own experiences at the hands of small-company petty tyrants) was pretty formative for me & my approach to working with collaborators - I've always vowed that never in my entire life will I make anyone go through what my roommate went through. My games & my ego are not in any way more important than someone's ability to live their life
(I'll finish by mentioning that the OTHER way this cuts is that when you're doing a lot of solo work, it is sometimes very hard to not be a shitty awful little tyrant to YOURSELF. I know that sounds cute and unserious but for real there have been periods where my life has been ruled by this gnawing shame & terror that I'm not doing enough, not working hard enough, not working long enough, that I should be putting more into this project or that project, why haven't I built a website and learned to cut my own trailers and started a podcast and built more relationships with streamers and and and and and it's just inescapable. And, like, you can, in theory, quit a shitty job, but it's a lot harder to excise a shitty boss from your own brain. They're obviously different experiences, but it's one more way in which the Indie Games Labor Experience is less than idyllic.)
