So there's a couple of things that make it different: Crunch in the video game industry (also happens in other similar industries like animation) occurs when a project is near completion and there are still a whole host of things left to do. Pay has very little to do with it, since a lot of the people crunching are not just crunching due to pay reasons - often their job stability and company growth can be tied to it. Hell, even what their co-workers think of them can be tied to it.
I've seen people passed over for raises and new positions because they did not "take one for the team" and crunch. Hell, at one of my old companies there was a matrix for above and beyond where people were awarded extra "points" that would go towards their performance scores based on how much of a "team player" they were, i.e. how much they crunched.
Crunch also trickles downwards and gets worse as it goes down. While CD PR may "only" be crunching for a month, there's a good chance that their external partners (which could be handling things like QA) have likely been crunching for longer, harder with even less job stability.
So if you take those two things into account and think about the people at the very bottom of the giant crunch mountain - outsourced people who are shamed and peer pressured into doing crunch all the time, so much so that any form of crunch becomes mandatory since your job and upwards mobility at a company are both tied to it. This creates stressful emotional, mental, and physical situations, so much as that "attrition" becomes a term brought up daily during conversations - which is really a light coded conversation about how badly employees are burning out.
People sacrifice their marriages, friendships, relationships with kids, and other family members just to get your favorite game out the door - that all generally means much more to people than getting a temporary salary increase. The human cost is very real, especially over prolonged periods of time.
Some crunch can even last 6+ months. As I said earlier, any kind of crunch, "mandatory" or not, is actually mandatory due to the vast amount of other things tied in with expectations of you doing crunch. Not to mention the vast amount of pressure some people feel to crunch because their boss is crunching.
TLDR: Tons of bullshit at play here rather than just an extra temporary salary increase.
That's great! As I mentioned earlier, pay isn't generally the problem with crunch - but I'm glad the devs are getting paid!
