If your friend was not very senior (10+ years experience), I would not believe what he says, since he probably did not have enough experience to judge the situation.

I think the idea that the game industry is "behind" other fields is kind of comical, given that games are some of the most complex software in the world, and big game teams have only a few hundred people on them, and meanwhile something relatively trivial like Twitter has 4000 people. It's true that game teams don't do a lot of Agile or TDD or whatever the next buzzword is, but that is because those things are mostly superstition and obviously don't work when you start attacking hard problems.

So if you are someone a few years out of school who learned TDD it is easy to say "games are behind, they don't do all the new stuff!!" while being unaware that almost all the new stuff is bogus cargo-cultism anyway.

I do agree that the game industry engages in unhealthy levels of crunch that are to its long-term detriment, but this is mostly an orthogonal issue to software engineering practices.