On my third game I tried very hard to make a game with a generous schedule and no crunch. One thing that I discovered was that it was very hard to get members of the team to let things go. If you are passionate, their is always room for improvement. So you had to create deadlines that put pressure on people.
Sure, but that seems like the opposite. Creating a deadline as a reasonable limit on the amount of work put in is a lot different from demanding the same amount of work in an unreasonable time.
Unless you align incentives correctly, you're not paying your developers to ship software, you're just paying them to write code.
Setting a deadline is one way of aligning incentives (ship by this date or else...) and can work well so long as there is a good conversation around requirements, appropriate milestones are set, and developers are trusted to make good faith estimates. However, it is not the only way.
