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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 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 five, 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 crunch.
Crunch.