After laying off Battlefield 6 developers, EA pays its CEO $38 million because Battlefield 6 did so well
Remember when Battlefield 6 dropped in 2025 and it was a big hit, selling seven million copies in three days and becoming the first Battlefield game to outsell a competing Call of Duty? And then Electronic Arts rewarded the people who made it by laying them off? And also laid off the entire team working on an all-new, more story-focused game in the series?
I remind you of all this—and, since we’re on the topic, of former Dragon Age boss Mark Darrah’s recent characterization of the company as “a hedge fund with a videogame hobby“—because EA released its Form 10-K/A SEC filing yesterday, revealing among other things that CEO Andrew Wilson’s “total compensation” for the company’s 2026 fiscal year was $38,649,984, an $8 million increase over his 2025 pay driven in no small part by the success of Battlefield 6.
There are numerous factors involved in EA’s decision to give $39 million to Wilson for a single year of doing whatever it is he does, of course, but “business performance” is surely one of the big ones. And that category is led by Battlefield, which met “all milestones for a high-quality launch,” including “positive critical reviews and stable services and gameplay.”
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“The highly successful Battlefield launch” warrants a second mention, alongside the move to sell the company to Saudi Arabia, in a separate category regarding the company’s management “in an unpredictable external environment.”
Big ups to Battlefield 6, then, and also to Wilson’s pay package. His base salary, for the record, was ‘only’ $1.3 million, the same as 2025, but the bonuses and bonus modifiers add up right quick.
Here’s a breakdown of the pay structure for Wilson and the other big dogs at EA, which also illustrates how his total pay shot up by $13 million in two years, even though his base salary hasn’t budged.
There’s a notable bump in Wilson’s “other compensation,” from $678,858 in 2025 to nearly $2.4 million in 2026. This, the report explains, is due primarily to an increase in his “personal security benefits.” An assessment conducted in 2025 recommended that Wilson use private air travel for all personal travel as well as business travel, and as a result he “was permitted to use corporate aircraft for personal travel subject to a 75-hour cap,” which ended up costing $1,245,946.
Hold on, there’s more. You may recall Joshua Wolens pointing out in 2025 that Wilson’s total compensation for that year was 260 times greater than EA’s median employee salary—a big increase from the 170:1 ratio the previous year. Well, it’s up again: The report says the ratio of Wilson’s compensation to the median EA employee was 305:1 in 2026. That gap widened despite the median salary at EA also increasing, from $117,302 in 2025 to $126,612 in 2026, although EA noted that it had calculated a new median employee salary for the 2026 comparison.
It was a pretty great year for Electronic Arts then—unless you were an employee at Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect, Motive, Ridgeline, Full Circle (it wasn’t all Battlefield), or EA’s recruitment, customer support, trust and safety, and IT teams who found themselves without a job while five people in the C-suite collectively “earned” around $80 million. For one year, remember.
It’s grotesque, but as Joshua said in 2025, this isn’t a problem unique to Wilson or EA. Our system prioritizes shareholder value above all else, and the relentless drive for maximal profits and growth has fuelled an explosive increase in executive compensation across the board. In 2019, for instance, Wilson just barely squeaked into As You Sow’s ranking of the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs, while former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick landed squarely in the middle of the list.
