This is when you toughen yourself up. You're lucky you get to learn this now when you don't have to look after anyone else. Life is hard, but it gets easier with practice.

Do make sure you get sleep, good food and exercise because this fuels your brain and that is your greatest asset.

Time to level up on your life. Do what it takes and you will be amazed by your new capabilities a year from now.

Do you see this changing?

I think another thing that perhaps affects games more is having zero knowledge of other studios' development approaches unless you or a buddy go and work there. I'm clueless about where the industry is as a whole.

That's interesting. Do you see games with longer lifetimes being a thing that the MMO persistent world game categories are causing to change?

I think social and virtual goods are probably a wider cause for change but then the line between MMO and them is pretty blurry (if it even exists) anyway.

Success is another catalyst ... Tapulous's Tap Tap Revenge probably had horrible code until it turned out they were going to be working with it for a long time.

Success is a good point.

I suppose there can be many reasons for the code to live longer.

Managing legacy code can be great for encouraging automated testing!