I've been around the block, and I've seen what game dev does to people. The mental gymnastics you have to engage in when dealing with mega-corps and contractual money issues, all while adapting to the 'politics' of the time. In 'that' era, Microsoft would hurl millions at you to make a piece of shit Kinect game just to show it had a library, few strings attached. Now they fuck with milestones at a deranged "should have a single player campaign/just add 4-player online simultaneous co-op" level.
I know you can't just equate mad corporation acquisitions and keeping an entertainment project going. It's a false equivalence BUT: You're Kamiya, one of few absolute videogame industry legends left, sleeping on an office floor, and you get the news that Microsoft is sacking the whole thing off, while at the same time finally closing that 26 billion deal for a website thing that already existed and would continued to have exist. There's a point at which the concept of money and modern civilisation just straight up breaks. Anyones mental health just shatters when you have to view 4 years of gruelling work as a total waste of time while someone shrugs their shoulders and pretends their hands are tied and 'don't have the money'.
With the automation boom continually threatening to completely upend the concept of workers and salaries, there's going to be a very hard to grapple with re-definition of money in the decades to come. It never hurts to realise the absolute absurdity of the scaling with situations like this.
