Aren’t gaming companies notorious for taking advantage of people who will work for crumbs because “passion”? Shame to see it.
Across the board, you're going to be earning less in the private, non-publicly traded sector unless you're working for governments.
Government contractors are generally the highest paid out of the entire private sector because they receive 'public' (ie; taxpayer) funds - beyond that, it's like small startups, and everyone is underpaid purposefully in hopes someone invests in them.
I work at a company where the 'top echelon' makes about the same right now across the board, and we're all 'underpaid' by the standards of working for say, ABK, Riot, Epic, Amazon, etc. But company relative, we're making the best we can with what we have.
We only exist because we have cut costs across the board and are able to pay our staff while making some form of net pay. We don't have a parent company, or shareholders - we're just kind of drifting. We have a lot of overseas contractors that would normally require paying more if they worked in the US, because the cost of living in a developed 1st world country is higher than say, Azerbaijan or Armenia.
EG7 might be publicly traded, but they're going to operate their games in a way that maximizes profits. If you're working for EG7, I bet you'll earn 3 or 4 times the amount that Daybreak employees make, but you wouldn't be working in game development, instead you'd be working in game production - specifically financial management at that point.
Daybreak isn't likely allotted a lot of money to pay a designer because they aren't paid well in general in smaller studios.
UK junior / associate designers start at 20k to 40k euros, for instance. It's wild.