I went to a school that focused on video game development, and took the programming course. They constantly liked to remind you how we, especially as programmers, were going to be subjected to 60-80 hour work weeks. As such, the school felt it was best to emulate the feel of crunch by making things -worse- than they were in the industry so that when we joined the work force it wouldn't come as such a huge shock. This isn't speculation either; They told me and many other students that's how they do things.
Of course, when they gave us surveys for how we felt things were being handled at the school I told them that as a educational institution that we should be trying to find better and more efficient ways to develop games, improving work life should improve game quality and such. Either that stuff would get ignored or scoffed at so... Whatever. The instructors were people who worked on major AAA games too, in the past. Stuff like Need for Speed, Call of Duty, Simpsons Hit and Run, Diddy Kong Racing. It's not like the faculty had a lack of experience.
My take from it all is that the industry runs the way it does because that's the way it's always been. The people in charge don't know any other way of running stuff. A lot of these instructors (Who were producers) even kinda hinted at this; Nobody in the game industry actually KNOWS how to make a game, so they just tried to emulate the movie industry structure instead which shares a lot of elements. So you get this weird Frankenstein structure that's somewhere between software development and movie development, that doesn't really suit the game industry perfectly but hey, what else can you do? As a result, a lot of these incompatible developmental and management structures end up causing a lot of the crunch.
Like others, I also believe the camel's back is going to break eventually. Games seem to cost more and more, but they've also never been easier to make due to engines like Unreal and Unity. It's getting to the point where the people with talent and drive can accomplish what they want on their own without publishers breathing down their necks. I feel that indie games differ from indie movies in that a single person can find greater success thanks to the tools and outlets (Like Steam) that are available. Gamers these days even seem more accepting of lower quality visuals as long as the gameplay is fantastic. And with that, why would anyone with any good ideas work in a sweatshop studio? Studios will either have to change, or risk losing business over releasing lower quality products.
As for me, I also nope'd my way out of there as others in this thread have done. Haven't tried to get into a studio and honestly don't want to. I've decided to try my hand at going indie; If I'm to work 80 hours a week it may as well be for the game ideas I have that gave me the drive to get me where I am today in the first place.