One of my good high school friends used to work for one of these big game firms and has since left for another big game firm where he's now working on one of these interactive MMORPG things. I have him out every year to talk about "real-world" software engineering to my sophomore-level CS course. He has all kinds of evil stories about crunch mode. ("How do you get to sleep after you've been up all day and you're too hyped up to actually sleep? Hard liquor!") Now that he works on a "service" instead of a "product", he finds that everybody is far more reasonable about the time it takes to get work done. Most of what they do is maintenance, and new features can be rolled in when they're good and ready without compromising all the (hopefully) happy users.