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Warning: I'm conflating developers and designers into a shared role. I'm also not talking about producers, testers, CSRs--just the thinkers and implementors. And from what I've seen, artists and graphic designers have a different, if still crunch-prone work experience.

I can't blame devs for leaving. Even as a contractor, I can feel like I've been working too long on a single project. I've been working at a major grocery retailer since July 1994 and it's getting very, very old--thankfully I have an end date, but if I didn't I'd be looking to jump ship. Actually, I'd jump ship now if the right job came along.

Creative devs don't like to do production support. It's draining, stressful, and everything you fix feels like it's half-assed, and this kind of support feels even worse because you've usually just come off crunch time and are thrown back into on-call or crunch work for weeks or months. Of course, a developer who's been working on a project for a year or longer has a good feel of how the system works, what can be changed without a lot of problems, and may be able to anticipate problems, and that makes him or her the best candidate for early production support. What's been hardest for me is when the team starts to break up after going live--suddenly, key knowledge is no longer available and maintenance suffers for it.

Developers want to move on to new projects, challenges, and opportunities. Spending too long working with the same software leads to stasis, and that's unhealthy for creative people. Ultimately, if the employer wants to keep their developers, it's up to the employer to keep their devs fresh with interesting new projects, and with the exception of Google, I haven't found a company that has a policy to encourage that kind of exploration. I have worked at a few who turned a blind eye to lunchtime FPS gaming or after-hours fragging, but those were also an exception (only two of 15 employers, in my experience).

Instead, most corporate employers hire devs in to do a new project or two, which then move into maintenance as the dev gets new projects. The corporate developer eventually ends up spending eight months to do a four week development project, and maintaining a dozen aging applications. Can you blame them for wanting to move on to new work? Yes, I know the console and single-player game industry is a different than corporate development, but MMO development cycles are likely analagous to corporate environments: both develop systems for dozens to thousands of simultaneous users, keep those systems functioning for years or decades, and have regular feature and bugfix releases.

The point, in short, is that developers and designers are often burned out by the time the project is released and may feel trapped, and often believe that changing employers is the best alternative to escape their project.