Spending a good chunk of your career in game development has a tendency to make it rough to job-hunt outside of games (with the exception of programmers - game programmers seem to get no shortage of offers from SV startups and bigger firms). Some of these people are very much 'locked in'; they probably moved to the bay area to work at LucasArts and brought families with them.

I mean, I interviewed at the LucasArts campus in SF maybe a year ago and the people there definitely didn't act like they were constantly at risk of losing their jobs. It was a big, established studio with a long history, and the team seemed to have a lot of people in just such a situation. 'Go work someplace else instead' is not a simple proposition for these people.