EA, or at least Dice, have done a lot to move away from crunch as much as possible. It's been a slow process, but I definitely saw improvements during my time at Ghost. The last game I worked on didn't really have much of a crunch at all. I think I might have done some overtime, but almost every week was 40 hours and no drama.
EA is bigger than Dice, I believe. Maybe people who work for Dice (I love their games and tech!) had the leverage of opposing crunch becoming a norm. How you get such leverage over to your parent company, I do not know that. :)
Dice experimented with ways to prevent crunch by cutting down on unnecessary time sinks. It's shown good results, so it's only natural that other EA studios want to adopt it.
