People leaving / burning out is the big problem, you just can't drive people to do any kind of non-mechanical work for those kinds of hours over an extended period of time. When they do leave, they take most of the knowledge they've gained about the project with them (regardless of the documentation procedures you have in place), which puts the development even further behind, driving management to crack out the whip and feed the cycle some more.

The absolute worst thing you can have is staff turnover in software projects, if you had 30% more workforce and your turnover was low, you'd gain more than those wages back in compression of delivery schedule and hence less wage duration (i.e., maybe it wouldn't have taken them 7 years to finish the game). That's without even thinking about if the 80th hour of a programmers work week is as productive as the 40th (it's not).

The problem is that game dev managers; see a willing workforce out there that they can abuse because of the industry, have stupidly optimistic deadlines and budgets set to even get the project approved and a general distain for project management as a task (it's all about getting people to tap keys as long and as quickly as possible).

My computer is leaking my IP Address to internet! Not a big deal, there are a whole lot of other services: Windows Update, Time Syching (most people will have that on), Weather (some people), 8000 different software update checks etc. If you are paranoid about your system checking if you can pull a file from an MS server, then disconnect your machine from the net, because everything else is going to scare the hell out of you.

Society needs a balance, entertainment and the arts in all it's forms (music, movies, sports etc.) is an important of people's lives, it's an important part of society it's self. Those people doing research and working hard on fixing various problems that afflict our society like everyone else take a break by cranking up some music or yelling at the TV whilst watching whatever sporting team they support.

Life can't be just about "serious" things. I agree that we don't necessarily fund or acknowledge those things which make a major impact towards advances for the human race, but I can tell you that my life would a far worse place without music, sports and books to read, and that the producers of those have enriched my life also.

It's easy for these sort of things to get to the "but the goverment should fund schools, police and hospitals more, aren't they more imporant than " argument. The truth is that you can't fund somethings to the complete exclusion of others, even though those things are more "important", you end up with a very unbalanced world.

End rant.