If we offer industry standard pay for games companies, we get industry standard hiring crisis and candidate quality, as seen at other games companies. Have you researched hiring success at other companies and not just salaries?
Experience suggests the answer to that from HR would be cultural inertia though, so it's not really them you'd need to persuade. It's a strategic decision for the company leaders, whether they think it's worth spending more to attract hires of the type who get better offers elsewhere.
Right, HRs exist to do the bidding of the execs, not be independent critical thinkers. They couldn't personally care less how much people are paid, they only need to be seen as doing broadly what the execs have approved.
Individual HR people may not all be critical thinkers, but HR people do salary research and keep up with trends in hiring. They have their own professional communities where they discuss this stuff. Even if they aren't all individually doing it, some within the HR communities look at such things and talk about it with others. They use this to advise each other and their execs if nothing else.
HR industry groups could, as a body, look into whether "the industry standard" is getting hiring results as well as employee churn, satisfaction, and company-reported satisfaction with their hiring outcomes and make that information available to HR people and then to whomever needs to take it into account in strategic decisions.
So my answer to HR's answer is:
If we offer industry standard pay for games companies, we get industry standard hiring crisis and candidate quality, as seen at other games companies. Have you researched hiring success at other companies and not just salaries?
Experience suggests the answer to that from HR would be cultural inertia though, so it's not really them you'd need to persuade. It's a strategic decision for the company leaders, whether they think it's worth spending more to attract hires of the type who get better offers elsewhere.