Lots of people want to work in the video game industry, so they'll put up with low pay, long hours, and apparently sexual harassment for a really long time.
Unfortunately, the situation is similar throughout most of the entertainment and sports industry. Employees want to work in the field so they put up with abuse and unprofessional behavior that wouldn't be tolerated in more staid industries.
Working a at FAANG is not as attractive to most when you don’t know about the issues in the video games industry. There is a reason why FAANG companies pay well and video games companies don’t have to.
I met zero people who told me they dreamed about working in a FAANG since childhood.
There is no mention in the article about these people being engineers. These people were fired "to address allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct". These are the bad guys. And finally, there isn't that much overlap between "perf tuning in AAA game engines and improving cloud workloads".
Both your sentences are true. So, what do we conclude from them though? It doesn’t change the core fact that the cost of skilled labor is lower for games companies than it is for FAANG, right?
It's also possible that in a creative industry like that you can't be as controlling when it comes to employee behavior. The people coming up with crazy new ideas are probably more eccentric than average. It might not be as easy to walk the line of separating the good eccentric behavior from the bad. An incident here, an incident there can pile up over the years. My impression is that it's not a very uncommon problem in the entertainment industry.