I would recommend listening to the Design Notes podcast where this discussion happened rather than read articles or quotes. She didn’t “denounce” the AAA games industry.
I spent ten years working 80+ hours a week on average, some projects I even did 100 hours a week for a month. It means giving up a huge chunk of your life and it’s not sustainable in the long run. I could write a novel about all the crazy behaviour I witnessed during those ten years. Thankfully, I made a personal choice to put an end to it. I am very happy where I am at now because we are making a very high quality game with almost zero crunch.
The long-term destruction created by endless crunch is in the billions of dollars. For example, here’s what John Riccitielo said about just one studio: http://news.softpedia.com/news/EA-Admits-Need-For-Speed-Franchise-Exploitation-with-Yearly-Iterations-157689.shtml
“I’ll tell you a story,” Riccitiello told the Bank
of America Merrill Lynch 2010 Media, Communications & Entertainment
Conference. "If you went back to when I first got into the games
industry, 1997, Need For Speed was a really strong title.
"In the '04 to '07 period, we had a single studio,
Black Box, up in Vancouver, building our [NFS games]. And we literally
had them on a death march building for five years in a row. [There were]
annual iterations, they had to put it out; no rest for the weary. "
“It’d happened before - games publishers do this
from time to time. We should have put them on two-year alternating
cycles but we didn’t. And the title declined dramatically. We started to
lose people. They didn’t want to work 24 hours a day, seven days a
week, 365 days a year.”
That studio was making an unbelievable amount of revenue and they killed it.
So yes, it is deadly for you as an individual and deadly for the life of a studio and deadly for long-term investment. There are no organizations or groups that can help you and ultimately the power is with you, the talent, to decide what sort of life you want to live.