Tell Bungie that for Destiny 2
"All hands on Deck" is that teams motto right now
That's code for crunch.
Game companies have recently gotten a lot better at renaming crunch to a million different things so you don't hear the word 'crunch'. Now it's called bullshit like
"Finalizing/Finishing Mode" and other such nonsense so that people
(developers, media, gamers) don't attach what they are saying to the negative connotations of crunch.
That said, neither introducing more developers or enacting crunch time makes a game develop
faster. It's a widespread belief that's demonstrably false. Additional developers introduce additional complications in everything from scheduling, communication, collaboration, directed vision, bugs, etc. And crunch time has had multiple papers on how anything over about 12 hours a day is actually a
net loss in productivity. People actually tend to get more productive work done in 6 hours a day than they do in 16 hours a day.
Both of these don't work. But companies keep doing it because the misconception about their effectiveness is rampant and management teams need to seem like they are doing
something to right the ship to investors, shareholders and COs. When the reality is that you end up with a better product if you let the same number of developers work their normal hours for another year than if you throw 100 new devs or double the daily man-hours to try to solve the problem.
But that doesn't tend to happen because crunch is cheaper
(pretty much everyone in the gaming industry is overtime exempt and bonuses never make up the difference) and employees are seen as disposable resources.