This should win an award. Omg.

It always depends. Once people have a career, like when they are already doctor, producer, lawyer, ... they can get away with somewhat normal working hours, because they are efficient and they do not need to be promoted further. So it's partly their decision then how much they work.

I know a patent lawyer who likes hunting so much, he frequently only works half days and then goes off hunting. He obviously gives up some money he could earn but he seems to be happy and nobody seems to object.

If only you are specialized enough you don't need to compete with too many people and then you can afford a more healthy work-life balance. In the end it's also better for oneself to not constantly work too much and a better health condition will surely have positive feedback on the number of thins you can achieve. For example, if you know you have to finish your daily amount of work before XX in the afternoon because the children care facility closes at this point, you will work much more focused and achieve more in less time.

All in all: I'm a big fan of measuring the output, not the time needed for it as well as establishing a culture of healthy work-life balance. Once the companies do not find anyone anymore who is letting them exploit him/her, things may change for all. For example it would be nice if working on the weekend became the exception not the rule. We are not quite there yet, but I hope that in the future it will be like this.

I guess I probably shouldn't have been so one sided in my original post and worded it more, carefully.
I've done long and shorter hours before.

Dice with more than 500 employees. Is that major enough?

Definitely. So assuming they don't overwork their employees, that's proof it's possible. Now all we need to do is convince studios in other countries to follow this model. :)

The old management thinking was that although it's extremely inefficient to work stupid-long hours because you burn out employees and their productivity drops, it's still free labor. And they think that by getting 2.5x to 3.x the labor for the same cost, that makes up for all the inefficiencies.

Of course, lawsuits eventually put and end to this in the US at the larger shops.

Now the thinking seems to be that project planning is too hard, so let's keep using crunch time to pump out more games faster, regardless of quality. Also the salaries came down to compensate for having to pay overtime.