Why did you work overtime if you knew you weren't gonna be paid?
Passion, at first. When that burned out after a while, there was still a desire to do right by our consumers - because if we didn't, sure as hell no-one else would. It's why a charge of "lazy devs" always makes me *really* angry, because the devs I worked with were utterly dedicated to the cause.
My core feeling is that the games I crunched on were simply never quite budgeted sufficiently - in terms of work hours and through that in terms of actual finances. I'm a little curious how the business side of things precisely takes place with that, because my
perception of it is as follows:
* Project is proposed to publisher (either a project originating from the developer or a commission to make a port of a major project originating elsewhere - for instance, I worked on the PSP port of From Russia With Love)
* Developer Management negotiates with publisher. Developer *needs* funding to keep the company afloat; Publisher has the power in this negotiation.
* Developer Management requests a budget lower than is ideal in order to convince the Publisher to sign
* Employees of Developer work crunch in order to make up the deficit.
It's a bit of a catch-22. Developer signs publisher deals, or developer cannot meet payroll. Publishers are out to get the cheapest deal they realistically can, so developer makes sacrifices to sweeten the pot. There's no shortage of potential employees - the lines of people looking to join the industry are massive. So you just... burn through them.
It's a tough one to find the way to get out of it. If publishers expect a budget to be presented that is dependent on crunch work to make the numbers, a developer may feel that they simply cannot expect to stay afloat without making that sacrifice.
