ok so like i just saw a take on gamefreak rushing out video games and making their people crunch and like
take everything i say with a grain of salt but i'm kind of a bit concerned with some of the preconceptions approached in this
first of, I'd just like to say that I actually worked as a junior game animator on a not-very-well-known AAA game for like... 8 months and I currently work as a production coordinator for tv animation and my opinions here are totally just based off my own work experience but okay here we go
When I was working in games animation as a junior for what could have been considered almost an indie project, my supervisor, who had more game releases under his belt, once gave us kind of an impromptu lesson on how in theory game companies worked
Game companies don't actually spend all their manpower on one team for one game. Gamefreak didn't immediately set these people to work on Scarlet/Violet immediately after PLA or anything. Most of the time, game companies have several teams working on several different projects, staggered in their development cycles, so that they can meet releases in staggered timelines. This means that the PLA team and the SwSh team and the ScarVi team are probably all different teams.
I'd also like to bring up the fact that when games are announced, they've already been in development for quite a long time. From what I've been told by my friends and mentors in the game industry, there are many game projects that are cancelled before they're even announced. Games that are announced have already been in the works till they are in a state where the publisher is confident that they can make release. What this means is that ScarVi could have been in the works since SwSh's release, or even before, which is actually quite a fair bit of time being used to develop the game. In fact, considering game development cycles are usually 2-3 years, this fits within the bounds of a normal game development time.
Moreover, if we're talking about crunch and the employees being treated well, I'd like to argue that the fact that the games being not super polished could very well be because Gamefreak is avoiding crunch culture. I mean, feel free to let me know if there are any primary sources indicating that Gamefreak has a history of crunch, but let me explain what I mean.
Games are, as far as I know, produced with an idea of projected returns. There's usually a certain budget allocated to the production of the game. This budget is for paying your employees, and this determines how many people you can pay and for how long. Production schedules are usually determined by said budget, and if you need to extend the game development or anything, that will mean needing more money. This money isn't coming from any sales of the game itself, so companies often have to measure whether it's worth it to spend that additional time and manpower or whether they should cut down extraneous content/levels. So, and this is a personal opinion, but I feel that sometimes when a game isn't as polished as it could be, this could be due to the fact that the company is cutting cost so that they won't have to force their workers to crunch.
Crunch is often caused by poor production planning or poor management of expectations. Again, I have no primary sources, and all I can do is guess at Gamefreak's schedules, but all things considered, they're probably doing a pretty good job keeping things rolling.
I'm not saying crunch doesn't happen, nor that Gamefreak doesn't crunch. But what I am saying is that releasing one or even multiple games a year is not a sign of crunch, it's just how things at big game companies work with proper planning and without overloading any individual team.
