But not everyone who has experienced crunch - and is hoping to escape it - has the option of launching a new studio. Others look around and see that the grass may be greener outside the commercial games sector, particularly where developers are making serious games.

Ben Sawyer, co-director of the Serious Games Initiative, believes that his environment is no panacea for developers.

"Serious games creators do get hit by crunches... just different kinds," he says. "Clients often take a long time to get back to you and they gum up your process, but then they still want to see deadlines get hit. So you're often crunching at the end."

"But, at the same time, many customers don't necessarily have large projects and they are often more understanding of your schedules, so you can get some leeway. However, no one should think that serious games development is the escape that it sounds like it could be."

On the other hand, Joe Straitiff has made the switch and doesn't regret it for a minute.

Straitiff worked at Midway, Infogrames, and Stormfront Studios, and was part of the class-action suit against EA (that also involved Hasty as the lead plaintiff) where, as a software engineer 3, his last project was The Urbz: Sims in the City.

"They were trying to get us to work at least 10 hours a day, seven days a week," he recalls. "I didn't quite give them that but I do remember 14-15-hour days a few days in a row every now and then, and I know I did some 80-hour weeks."

Today, Straitiff is senior software engineer at San Mateo, CA-based Forterra Systems which produces private and secure MMO virtual worlds for corporate, government, defense, medical, and educational clients, not gamers.

"I've been here over three years now, and it's been regular hours 99% of the time," he says. "And the other 1% is never a lot, just support for one of the major shows. Last year there was no extra time necessary at all."

While Straitiff can't vouch for the fact that Forterra is typical of all serious games studios, he does believe that the serious side has a much higher quality of life.

"On this side of the fence, our deliveries have to be solid while still being maintainable," he explains. "The customers are fewer - paying a lot more for the product - and they expect regular updates. We are selling them a platform, so we spend a lot of time estimating and tracking progress, adjusting everything along the way."

In comparison, at commercial games studios, Straitiff recalls schedules that everyone knew were impossible from the start, "but the pressure was still there to just get it done. Everyone wanted to ship a game every Christmas, which amounted to about six months of dev time for a title, clearly not enough for a decent game. So everyone crunched and hacked away."

He believes that if the games industry could just get past the "we've got to ship for Christmas or we're dead" attitude, conditions would improve considerably.

"At Forterra, I'm active in the Process Workgroup where we're constantly striving to make engineering process sane, predictable, and useful," he says. "We're shipping a platform with periodic releases that we expect to maintain and improve for years to come, so the ‘hack it and ship the pig' attitude just doesn't work for us."

Would Straitiff ever go back?

"Well, interesting opportunities are always a draw, especially since the memories of the bad times tend to fade over time," he says. "But I wouldn't budge unless I found a company that has all its ducks in a row and could convince me of that. Besides, working on cutting-edge game technology here is fun; distributed simulation is complicated and working with that type of platform is an interesting challenge."

"The biggest missing piece is seeing your game on the shelf at the local game store," he admits. "That never goes away."