People see nothing wrong with instantly choosing a side once a news piece hits. It can be a bit...saddening.
Give me a break. First of all. This Totilo article is not a 'news piece'. It's a communist shitpost. This board skews fairly old... I think it's reasonable to expect for everyone to have at least some familiarity with the generalized leftist complaint of "The CEOs make too much money and that's bad, aren't I right comrades?!?" Anyone with half a brain can see just from the title of this 'news article' that it's red mea... err... soymilk....Impossible Burger (tm)... err uhh... tofu. It's tofu for that kind of reader.
All that is obvious at a glance... but let's look at 'news piece'. Oh hey he made a couple of charts. Including one to illustrate the extent of the problem of CEO pay. Now.. visualizations like this can be fun and awe inspiring:
But of course a ~250-1 scale is something a person of average intelligence can comprehend pretty easily.
So, okay, it's fun tofu for his audience... but it doesn't take long to see just how lazy and disingenuous this 'news piece' is. First of all, he never bothers to chart the actual thing.. ya know.. the ratio. You'd see it tick up from last year. But it's not the dramatic comedy of making a deliberately overstretched graph to scratch that Marxist itch. But it is lazy.
But here come the real problems:
Totilo said:
EA CEO Andrew Wilson received $30.5 million in cash and stock pay for the 12 months ending March 31, 2025, nearly $5 million up from the year before, according to EA's
most recent proxy filing, which was issued earlier this week.
That's a significant boost for the long-time CEO of the studio behind Battlefield, Dragon Age and Madden.
It also went in the opposite direction as the EA worker pay to which the company annually compares Wilson's take.
EA reported that the median income for its full-time employees in 2024 was $117,000, down from $149,000 the year before.
Note that EA's tally for worker pay is disappointingly imprecise. It's ostensibly based on a median average, not the mean (median = pulling the middle number from a stack of salaries; mean = adding the salary stack together, then dividing by the number of salaries in that stack).
Confusingly, EA says it used "the same median employee" in 2025 that it used to compare compensation with Wilson in 2023 and 2024. It does not explain that workers' 2025 pay drop, but says its figures for CEO and worker pay both include bonuses and stock grants, which can rise and fall in a given year.
This is just insanity. He links the 'proxy filing'.. it takes all of 15 seconds to find:
SEC Filing said:
Fiscal Year 2025 Pay Ratio
For fiscal year 2025, the annual total compensation of our median employee was $117,302, and the annual total compensation of Mr. Wilson, was $30,529,835. The ratio of these amounts is 260 to 1.
This ratio is a reasonable estimate calculated in a manner consistent with Item 402(u) of Regulation S-K under the Exchange Act.
To identify our median employee, we used a consistently applied compensation measure ("CACM") for all employees on our worldwide payroll as of March 15, 2025, including full time, part-time, regular, and temporary employees.
Our CACM consisted of the following elements of compensation, as obtained from our internal payroll and other systems:
■ base salary as of March 15, 2025 (annualized for permanent employees on leave of absence or not employed for the full year);
■ discretionary bonuses (performance or other one-time payments) paid to employees in fiscal year 2025;
■ the grant date fair market value of equity awards granted to employees in fiscal year 2025; and
■ exchange rates were applied as of the determination date to convert all non-U.S. currencies into U.S. dollars.
Other than annualizing base salary for permanent employees, we did not make any compensation adjustments whether for cost of living or otherwise in the identification process.
The median employee's annual total compensation for fiscal year 2025 was calculated in USD and determined using the same methodology used to determine Mr. Wilson's annual total compensation set forth in the "Fiscal Year 2025 Summary Compensation Table."
As permitted under SEC rules, we are using the same median employee identified for purposes of calculating the CEO pay ratio in fiscal years 2023 and 2024. We believe there has been no change in fiscal year 2025 to our employee population, employee compensation arrangements, or the circumstances of that median employee since he or she was first identified that would result in a significant change to our pay ratio.
SEC regulations permit companies to adopt a variety of methodologies, apply certain exclusions and to make reasonable estimates and assumptions that reflect their compensation practices and other factors unique to their workforce and business operations when calculating their pay ratio. Therefore, the pay ratio reported by other companies may not be comparable to the pay ratio reported above.
The tl;dr is that they reported the numbers the way they did (i.e. median) because *gasp* that's what SEC rules ask for, and they reused the same employee because they are allowed to use the same employee for three years if certain circumstances don't change. A
journalist would have figured that out. If he failed to figure it out from looking at the SEC filing that he himself referenced, another 20 seconds of research into the referenced rules and the
Dodd-Frank bill would have given him all the answers. But instead, he smugly pontificates on
mean vs median and
durr I dunno how they came up with the same median employee it's all so confusing. If he was doing actual
journalism here, he could have come up with real questions.
Now, he does threaten to do actual journalism on the other side of a pay wall. If someone actually subscribes to this garbage and wants to let me know if it gets any better, then by all means let me know. Otherwise I'll just assume it says FREE LUIGI all caps style and maybe has that one picture of Che. I am absolutely not going to give the benefit of the doubt to the Great Gazoo here. He's functioning as an
activist, not a
journalist.
That's why I said he helped guide their sports division to maximum profits. I am aware of his influence on profits, but I personally feel that it is odd of people here to complain about EA's dwindling output over the past decade yet cheer at this development.
At this point this is nothing but a strawman. Quote people who are
happy (as opposed to resigned, or indifferent... ya know happy, as you would expect a 'cheering' person to be) about Andrew Wilson personally getting big payouts and complaining about EA's output or whatever.
I don't know if they are aware, or if they refuse to understand the correlation, or if they are bullishly trying to have their cake and eat it too.
See your quote below:
And in saying this two things can be true.
"Andrew Wilson hit his metrics and therefore him being paid what he is owed isn't a big deal, and could probably be considered a successful CEO" and "I personally don't like the direction EA has taken" are not mutually exclusive statements. They are
two things that can be true
He is great for profits and shareholders, but bad for output and catalogue. If more and more future projects are cut, then one could theoretically claim he is resting on his laurels, which would pretty much be the sports games and their MTX.
Those alone are enough to fulfill a profit quota, while the rest of their I.P. catalogue is held hostage for decades.
Held hostage, lmao.
Yes, but think about those few, paltry amount of titles compared to what they used to release. Their older catalogues (arguably up until mid-PS4) are what gave them their image of being one of the Big 3. They even used to be a trendsetter at one point.
Longer dev times and fewer releases are hardly an Andrew Wilson exclusive. "Image of being one of the Big 3"? What the.. Who the..? Huh? Talk about an arbitrary fanboy metric.
The funny thing is their back catalogue is huge and varied enough to not even need original I.P. and that's not even including EA Big and EA Originals.
It's worth looking up again when you get the chance. It's going to be a lot of 'wow, EA had this? And that too?" as you see the giant graveyard of I.P. they left behind. Even Dead Space has been buried 6ft under again.
Maybe you are overvaluing their graveyard of IPs? Maybe if your fantasy CEO had control of EA and decided to eschew market research to greenlight investment into a long list of dead IPs... maybe just maybe such decisions could lead to financial disaster?
Again, like I said above, two things can be true at once. He is making the company money to the detriment of many, including gamers.
The detriment of me... the detriment of you... the detriment of maaaaaany.