Andrew Wilson took home $38,649,984 last fiscal year. The people who built the game that made that number possible got laid off in March.
That’s the whole story, and it’s uglier the longer you look at it.
Electronic Arts filed the paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the breakdown is about what you’d expect: most of Wilson’s haul came from stock awards, a non-equity incentive plan and “other compensation.” It’s more than $8 million above what he made the year before.
The rest of the C-suite did fine too
Wilson wasn’t alone. The other named executive officers cleared eight figures or close to it: Stuart Canfield at over $11.3 million, Laura Miele at over $13.7 million, Mala Singh at over $8.4 million and Jacob Schatz at over $8.5 million.
EA posted $7.531 billion in net revenue for the fiscal year, up 9%.
“Driven by our talented teams and disciplined execution, we delivered a record FY26, highlighted by the incredibly successful launch of our iconic Battlefield franchise,” Wilson said in a financial report.
Read that first clause again. Talented teams.
Battlefield 6 didn’t just do well, it beat Call of Duty
The game earned the boast, at least. Battlefield 6 was the biggest launch in franchise history and the first entry in the series to outsell a Call of Duty game released the same year, which is the kind of sentence nobody has been able to write since roughly the Obama administration.
It was the highest-selling game in the U.S. in 2025, moving over 20 million copies by December, according to analyst Rhys Elliott.
And then in March, EA laid off an unspecified number of developers across Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect and Motive Studios. The company called it a “realignment.”
The statement said everything by saying nothing
“We’ve made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community,” an EA spokesperson wrote in a statement to IGN at the time. “Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we’re continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs.”
Battlefield 6 reportedly went over budget. Somebody had to eat that cost, and it clearly wasn’t the people signing the memos.
Everyone else in the industry is bleeding
The wider picture makes this worse, not better. Publishers across the board have been running mass layoffs, with Xbox cutting over 3,000 employees. Hardware shortages, rising development costs and a release calendar with no breathing room have squeezed the entire business.
Against all that, Battlefield 6 was a rare clean win. A record year, built on a franchise that finally landed. If the success stories still end in layoffs, the math isn’t broken by accident.
And the ownership question is still open
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is in the middle of acquiring EA in a $55 billion transaction that also includes private equity fund Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. The European Commission recently approved the deal, moving it closer to done.
Whoever holds the keys next inherits a company that just proved it can print money and still decide the developers are the expensive part.
