https://www.pcgamer.com/telltale-co-founder-crunch-was-necessary-to-keep-studio-afloat/

Over the past 12 months, multiple former employees of The Walking Dead developer Telltale Games, which closed down last year, have told stories about the brutal crunch culture within the studio. Narrative designer Rachel Noel has spoken of 80-hour work weeks, and this week another former narrative designer, Emily Grace Buck, told GameInformer that last-minute changes to games mandated crunch for a "huge percentage of the studio". Following that report, studio co-founder and former CEO Kevin Bruner told the publication that working at Telltale was "trial by fire", but that crunch was necessary to keep the studio afloat for as long as possible.

"For other studios, it happens all the time in games where, 'Our release date is this fall' and then the studio will announce that fall, 'Oh you know what, the game wasn’t ready, we pushed it out until next spring.' And that really wasn’t something that Telltale could do," he said. "We didn’t have the budgets to delay production that long; we didn’t have the cushion."