Buying and playing the game means that their hard work wasnt for nothing.
Not buying a game and not playing doesnt change anything about this work culture that is pretty common.
It sucks but consumers have almost none influence to that.
Crunch culture being highlighted is going on for over a decade now and can only fought against with unions and changes inside the industry itself.
No consumer should feel guilty about this and think they support crunch culture because most, even indie games have crunch nowadays.
This.
Remember an episode in Friends, where Phoebe dated a health inspector and wherever they went to eat, he ended up closing the restaurant because of violations and by nightfall they had ran out of places to eat? I'm somehow reminded of this.
If people want to boycott any product that is produced by crunch, they will forego at least 60% of the stuff they eat/play/listen/view/experience.
If you want to blame someone, blame capitalism, the stockmarket, the poor implementation of laws, human greed … take your pick.
I don't know if Boon is the bad guy here. We don't know the timetables that Warner imposes on NRS, we don't know how much of that crunch is because of bad management (yeah, that's a thing), unreasonable demands by WB, incompetence on the side of the dev team (which crunch will only amplify), or simple human greed. We need more evidence before we can come to a solid conclusion.
At this point, the leak that happened back then, with the half-JPGed roster/Noob/MK3 Kano/Cetrion/Kollector/Erron Black? Wouldn't surprise me if it was a disgrunted employee who was fired by Boon and wanted to give him the middle finger by leaking all of the roster and piss all over NRS' hype train schedule.
