I believe people use the Milkshape modeler a lot since it works with some game formats. I think I read once that you could use it to take the format produced by the GMax freeware 3DSMax program for gaming and convert them to another format like obj. Milkshape is low polygon so that may be what they are using.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken