If you think indies and self-owned game developers don't crunch, I have news for you. It's pervasive, and sometimes self inflicted (often in a non-malicious way). It's common for devs to get "in the zone" and not want to stop, especially if they are really excited for a certain feature or they just *really* like programming. If enough people start doing that, then the game workers who otherwise wouldn't do this start feeling like the odd one out, and may stay late anyway out of a sense of misguided "support". Furthermore, the games industry is highly saturated, heavily competitive, and volatile (changes to web browsers or newly discovered vulnerabilities in a backend software stack can make a lot of urgent, unplanned work for a project like this with little to no warning). The urge to go into heroics mode to deliver a very impressive feature is partly shaped by this environment. And self inflicted crunch has the same bad health/project effects as crunch mandated from top-down.

Having a group policy of "we all go home on time, no exceptions" and enforcing it goes a long way to stopping that behavior and keeping the peer pressure effects from setting in.

Also, I think their statements may be less about making players "feel bad" and more as a positive example for other game devs: "Yes, we can have a profitable game studio without doing this."