So, here's the problem with your 'research'...
First is that the salary spreadsheet only has about 390 records in it as of this posting. Blizzard employs more than 10x that amount of people. So the data available from Blizzard employees is <10% of the actual salary distribution. It's impossible to determine if that's the low end, the average, or the high end. Generally speaking, people only share salaries when they are exceptionally high or exceedingly low - so it's probably not a good barometer either way for judging typical pay for Blizzard employees.
This should be compounded by the fact that other developers have shared that Blizzard has widespread association with low pay. And the numbers in the spreadsheet don't actually match up with those experiences at all. There are a lot of inconsistencies between what I know friends who moved to Blizzard were paid, what Blizzard quoted myself and others for salaries for moving over to Blizzard, and the numbers in the spreadsheet - and by that I mean the figures shared are much, much higher than I expected. Maybe that means Blizzard very recently changed their pay structures, maybe that means only people actually getting paid appropriately responded to the spreadsheet, or maybe it means the spreadsheet is bullshit. Who knows.
Then you compared those figures to Glassdoor and Payscale - which themselves have discrepancies between 'average' pay for specific job titles of $10k-$20k+. These have always been widely accepted as nothing more than rough ballparks and not definitive breakdowns of industry averages. Again, the people who tend to shared this data are often at the far ends of the spectrum - which usually makes them artificially high or artificially low. And that's not even considering that job titles between different companies have widely different job duties and levels of experience and pay scales - which I can't really fault you for, since that's not intuitive unless you've worked across multiple studios in the industry. But a Game Designer at one studio is not a 1-to-1 correlation to the same title at other studios. Hell, sometimes they're not even correlated between different teams under the same company.
So... there's limited data. The validity and accuracy of that data is questionable at best. The comparison data is ballpark at best. The job title associations are loosely defined. And the conclusions based on limited, invalid, inaccurate, ballpark, and dissociated data directly conflict with the foundational premise establish by developers themselves - both within and outside of Blizzard.
Which makes me wonder what is more likely...
That all of these developers are full of shit and just whining about Blizzard's notorious pay issues despite the 'data' claiming otherwise.
Or... maybe the 'data' haphazardly slapped together by 'some dude on the internet' may not be depicting an accurate representation of the issue.
And yet, you'd rather trust an article with barely any data.
Gotcha. YSK there are insider terms for folks who just refuse accept analysis because "they know what they know".
I have "an uncle who works at Nintendo" who knows your "friends who moved to Blizzard" - should we treat those as data points?
I stand by my point that based on the data available to us - Blizzard developers (engineers), artists, etc. seem to be fairly compensated. However, CS is not fairly compensated at all. Riot does has better pay in several instances.
Again, that research where you take an extremely narrow view into the industry and only take "software engineers" into account. Programmers historically have the best pay in any company and is usually the most stable across multiple companies. This is not the case for any of the other roles in game development, all those roles you conveniently ignore. The only result you are achieving is derailing the thread with unreliable research to push a fake news narrative under the disguise of "I just want to check it for myself". all the figures you quote from glassdoor are wildly inaccurate and often inflated by the companies themselves who put down anonymous salary quotes or company reviews to make their companies look better since they know people do check places like glassdoor to give them ballparks.
It is actually impossible to fact check this since there is no reliable source of information except those people who are willing to give you their true salaries, and good luck in that industry wide adventure.
I gave breakouts for other roles like CS, Artists, etc. in a follow-up - did you miss that part perchance?
I think those of us who've bothered to look at the actual data will realize what the issue:
While some employees can afford the cost of living in the area, others can't. It is unrealistic to expect test analysts (Avg. $51k), CS agents (Avg. $41k), Game Masters (Avg. $36k) be able to live there if we consider those incomes as Household Income (HHI).
Note: While the figures may be Personal Income (PI) and HHI may be higher, it is not relevant to the discussion and we'll treat them as HHI
The easy, short term solution would be given those teams a raise across the board to:
1. Make salaries competitive if they aren't
2. Reduce turnover, which in turn saves onboarding / training costs
3. Attract talent
However, this isn't always possible because of financial objectives. We are simply putting a bandaid on the real problem - which is high cost of living in the area.
The more viable long term solution is to relocate those teams to an area with lower cost of living, while maintaining competitive wages.
Personally, I believe that happy employees make better employees - and SPECIALLY for Customer Service. Imagine if you will, an unhappy customer has to talk to an unhappy customer service agent. That's a bad scenario. You always want your CS agents WANT to help. Across the board, we have seen that while compensation is not directly tied to performance, paying higher than industry wages usually leads to better attitudes and work ethics.I want my direct reports to focus on their job and not worry about making ends meet. I've given unrequested pay raises because I saw the pay needle move - heck, I want to retain my best employees because as someone mentioned earlier "companies want to retain people who give the company an advantage".