To make it simple let's say the typical person working on the game was being told to put in 60 hours a week, now they are down to your normal 40 hours a week... that would, in theory, make the game take 50% longer to complete, right?
I do not have a big opinion on crunch. But I do find it odd there are so many fans of games who freak out about companies having crunch... then at the same time get upset with the companies/devs when things take longer after crunch policies are removed.
Not exactly
The latest studies have found that the average worker is productive only about 3-4 hours out of the typical 8 hours work day. Anything after that is just diminishing returns in both quantity and quality.
Now if you throw in forced extra time over long periods of times it gets exponentially worse as you add a lot of different factors that will only drain a worker's capabilities and only get worse as time goes on. Out of your 60 hours work week, you're not even getting 30 hours of productive, quality work.
That's not to say crunch doesn't get extra work done, it does, but it does so in a very poor way. Forcing people to push themselves to their limits and beyond is a bad idea. This doesn't lead to quality work, it just doesn't. Unhappy workers are not productive nor do they produce good quality, this is especially true for creative work like video game development. So instead of getting the 12-15 hours worth of quality work from a normal 40 hours work week you might get 20 out of those 60 but then that second week you get 19.5, then 19 and on and on it goes and on top of that the quality of work will drop just as steadily.
It's one of the reasons why an ever increasing number of companies are fiddling around with shorter work weeks, offering work from home, better salaries and many other things and seeing a huge return on their investment as people are productive for longer periods and produce better quality work. Happy workers are better workers, who would've thought?
Crunch is a very, very poor way of doing things. It might get some extra work done but it's not quality work and there are better ways of raising your workforce's productivity that are not detrimental to them.