Reminds me of the time I had to do 84 daily shows a month. I was not a happy camper. Burned out after eight months, gave it another go, crashed in flames in 4 months. I am now creatively bankrupt, and feel like 10 years older. 

The industry definitely still has a macho "if you don't want to be here 80 hours a week then don't be here" attitude (for the most part - this isn't true everywhere). This, in turn, gives studios the ability to plan out projects poorly and get away with it  time and time again. Since people WILL work overtime it means project schedulers have a large built-in buffer to cover mistakes in scheduling. There's just enough decent developers with only a couple years experience to keep the machine running. If that weren't the case then the industry would be forced to improve since the games simply wouldn't be shippable near the intended release date. Things are getting better slowly, but the "coolness" of working on games will always be a huge hurdle to overcome when it comes to improving quality of life.

Jon

The main reason I never got into game development was because I enjoyed discovering the games.  I'm pretty savvy when it comes to computers and their applications but I saw early on that creating games, and playing were two very different things.  I've since realized that computers/computer games are my hobby and therefore do not want it to be my profession.  I had a friend that I grew up with playing video games.  He attended the Art Institute and graduated from their with a graphics degree of some sort.  He went on to California and I heard he landed a job with square/enix.  However his job was a game tester and had nothing to do with actual creation of the game.  After about a year or two of him doing that he came back home and I had ran into him.  During our talk he brought up the game testing and brought up how I told him that the design of games is really no fun.  It's all about playing them and discovering them.  This article truly backs my stance up.