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This is Planet Money from NPR.

Okay, let's do a quick comparison.

$184 billion.

By one estimate, that's how much the video game industry made last year.

Now if you look at movies, the record for the global box office is $42 billion.

That was back in 2019.

Blockbuster movies like Avatar and Avengers Endgame made billions of dollars each,

but so do games like Minecraft and Pokemon. But the difference is maybe that video games just have a more lucrative shelf life than movies.

Take Grand Theft Auto 5, the franchise's most recent release from 2013.

That's already made more than any movie ever.

All this is to say, the business of video games is huge and growing.

And yet it's easy to miss the scale of the industry and what it takes to build one of these blockbuster

games. There is a cost to putting out these complex products and that cost is often felt in

human terms.

Workers at video game companies are known for putting in long grueling hours.

This punishing schedule is so entrenched in the industry that it has a special name.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

And crunch has long been treated as a necessary evil for producing high quality games on time.

You always hear about Crunch?

I've definitely done the, you know, get there very early,

...