I’m gonna take a wild guess that the games with high budgets that aren’t “selling”, are just not selling “enough” to cover the “costs” of the executives. I guess it wasn’t much of a guess:

and they’re not selling nearly as well as expected," Sweeney said. "Whereas other games are going incredibly strong

Do they think that these other games “going incredibly strong” are making the money they hope to make? They’re probably making much less but managing it much better. The savings are almost infinite when you don’t approve every executive bonus pay package.