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[Zathalus]

Got to love the disconnect. We want better games and love gaming but fuck the developers that actually make the games.

Also, why are all the good developers leaving the game development market and moving to safe boring jobs, don't they have passion?

 

[roosnam1980]

his pay is up cause he killed codemasters recently

 

[CliffBronger]

EA is now more of a gambling company first and a game dev second.

If gambling revenue is up the ceo gets rewarded.

 

[CobraAB]

Is any of this truly a revelation?

 

[Braag]

I mean, the CEO of the company I work for makes 13x more money than I do in a year (I counted). We have had 2 layoffs (the only 2 in the company's history) since he became our CEO, yet he still gets paid crazy sums every year.

So everyone should try to become a CEO of a medium to large sized company and laugh at the absurd amounts of money you end up making.

 

[Lionel Richie]

It's far less imaginary than you think. I worked in investments for many years, earned a buck or two from it.
The fundamental basis of investments has nothing to do with exponential growth. It's just some stupid stuff invented by wanna-be internet crowd.

Tell me then, say EA runs a profit based endeavor, to simplify shit assume they have an operational budget of 200 million and they make back 210 million or something like that. Small profit, but a profit nonetheless. Would investors be pleased?

 

[Gamer_By_Proxy]

So the CEO lowered operational costs and deserved a raise?

 

[Felessan]

Tell me then, say EA runs a profit based endeavor, to simplify shit assume they have an operational budget of 200 million and they make back 210 million or something like that. Small profit, but a profit nonetheless. Would investors be pleased?

Make it 230 mln and investors will be pleased.
Basis is to have a a risk-adjusted return at certain level, for investors to have interest in investing into company and not just buying Fed bonds. There this return either put back into company for growth of company or paid back to investor so they can invest it elsewhere.

You can check how many companies in SnP500 have "exponential growth" - not many. But all of them investment grade companies.

 

[Lionel Richie]

Make it 230 mln and investors will be pleased.
Basis is to have a a risk-adjusted return at certain level, for investors to have interest in investing into company and not just buying Fed bonds. There this return either put back into company for growth of company or paid back to investor so they can invest it elsewhere.

You can check how many companies in SnP500 have "exponential growth" - not many. But all of them investment grade companies.

Well that's good to know friend, I think at this point the best we can hope out of these huge ass AAA publishers in the long term as THING STAND RIGHT NOW is for them to have simple operating profit. I think EA has done a good job at navigating the monetization aspect of it, I just hope to see better products from them.

 

[Perrott]

Fuck Andrew Wilson, but also there are significantly better places to work than EA

Isn't EA actually one of the best places to work in the industry? Sure, their output as a game publisher might not be the best, but to my understanding the people working there are treated and offered a way better deal than at other major companies.

 

[Kerotan]

Boardroom:
Hey we'll have a big bonus for you if you can cut costs by $50m

CEO: Sorry lads you're all taking a 10% cut this year!

 

[Avid Reading Horse]

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:

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:

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.

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

He is spearheading the sale of EA to another "entity" he is probably hitting internal goals toward that and he will probably go along with the company upon sale.

 

[Killer8]

My point isn't about the amount of money he has made the company. A lot of CEOs can help make a line go up. His era of EA has done very well with their Futbol and Football games. It's everything else that's the problem.

It is an odd juxtaposition for some posters here to talk about the amazing heyday of EA and at the same time run defense for a guy who was in charge of the changes that took all of those I.P. away from them.

I say this time and time again on this forum, but things don't have to be one or the other. There will be times in life where you will disagree with a friend and agree with an enemy. So again, people here don't have to defend Andrew Wilson just because of the person/people who brought up this information as a negative. There's no reward or 'gotcha' in doing so.

This really depends on what time period people think was the heyday. If they think the heyday was the seventh gen, then I suppose Wilson becoming CEO in 2013 coinciding with a perceived drop in quality is a logical enough connection.

I think the heyday was much earlier though, in the sixth gen, and that EA already dropped in quality years prior to Wilson while Riccitiello was CEO. Remember that under Riccitiello, EA was twice voted the worst company (full stop) in America. They had a lot of good new IPs at the start of the seventh gen but by the end of it many had fizzled out in terms of quality, sales or both.

For some people, their heyday was even earlier. This list for example:

Burnout
SSX
Sim City
Command & Conquer
Wing Commander
Ultima
Dungeon Keeper
Populous
Syndicate
Titanfall
Road Rash
Strike (Desert Strike, Jungle Strike, etc.)

Full of classics but also many series that have not been relevant since the 90s.

I just don't see anything uniquely evil about Wilson's stewardship when it's been a company mired in controversy, studio closures and middling output for decades.

You can tell who knows of Andrew Wilson and who doesn't ITT.

The blanket statements about how valuable CEOs are don't apply to someone who was handed EA when their I.P. were firing on all cylinders, and then closed all of those doors over the next decade to turn them into the just a primarily-sports company, featuring Star Wars.

To me, sports games featuring Star Wars isn't much different from how things were in the early '00s. They've heavily relied on licensing deals like Harry Potter, 007 and Lord of the Rings for a long time.

 

[Hudo]

Full of classics but also many series that have not been relevant since the 90s.

I just don't see anything uniquely evil about Wilson's stewardship when it's been a company mired in controversy, studio closures and middling output for decades.

He also doesn't do anything to provide EA with something that can carry the company besides EA Sports, which has been carrying the whole corporation for more than a decade now. If I was a shareholder, I'd be worried as fuck.

 

[March Climber]

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:

This is just insanity. He links the 'proxy filing'.. it takes all of 15 seconds to find:


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.


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.

See your quote below:

"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


Held hostage, lmao.

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.

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?

The detriment of me... the detriment of you... the detriment of maaaaaany.

This really depends on what time period people think was the heyday. If they think the heyday was the seventh gen, then I suppose Wilson becoming CEO in 2013 coinciding with a perceived drop in quality is a logical enough connection.

I think the heyday was much earlier though, in the sixth gen, and that EA already dropped in quality years prior to Wilson while Riccitiello was CEO. Remember that under Riccitiello, EA was twice voted the worst company (full stop) in America. They had a lot of good new IPs at the start of the seventh gen but by the end of it many had fizzled out in terms of quality, sales or both.

For some people, their heyday was even earlier. This list for example:



Full of classics but also many series that have not been relevant since the 90s.

I just don't see anything uniquely evil about Wilson's stewardship when it's been a company mired in controversy, studio closures and middling output for decades.



To me, sports games featuring Star Wars isn't much different from how things were in the early '00s. They've heavily relied on licensing deals like Harry Potter, 007 and Lord of the Rings for a long time.

Fair points. Killer8 and Avid Reading Horse , what is your ideal vision for EA's future in the next decade?

 

[Avid Reading Horse]

Fair points. Killer8 and Avid Reading Horse , what is your ideal vision for EA's future in the next decade?

Wuhhh.wahhh..waaiiit a second:

My go-to lines:

'What can I do to help?'
'How can we solve this?'
'Where do we go from here?'
'What do you want to do now?'

There are probably more lines I can think of, but the point is redirecting the person to a call of action.

It usually helps them proceed forward to a potential solution, rather than just hanging onto the anger for a prolonged period of time.

STOP TELLING ME TO CALM DOWN!!!

With that out of the way, if you mean that question in a "CEO vision" kind of way, I don't have one. I don't pay that much attention to them. I'm perfectly serious in saying I wouldn't know Andrew Wilson was the CEO of EA without having clicked on this thread.

As for personal things I'd like out of them? Titanfall 3 for sure, but I understand why it's not a thing. New Battlefield sounds like it's shaping up nicely. I'm not a fan of the Madden/FC gambling stuff but that seems like more of a regulatory problem than anything. I'm sure there's other stuff but I'm not that attached to IPs anymore. The last couple of decades of Star Wars and Star Trek did enough damage there, as did quite a few games I'm sure. Speaking of, Mass Effect... Andromeda was trash, but really the originals recycled pretty much all the sci-fi ideas into a big hodgepodge would I really care for a sequel even if it's good? That shit just seems done. It's too rare for an IP to sustain greatness. Better off looking at new stuff than munching on membaberries, at least you can evaluate it on its own merits.

So I don't really care that much either way, they can do good business, they can Ubi their way out of existence. I'm not actively playing any of their stuff right now, but I'll check out good FPS games if they put 'em out.

 

[Killer8]

Fair points. Killer8 and Avid Reading Horse , what is your ideal vision for EA's future in the next decade?

They need to get their internal studios working on some new AAA IP. It was the best thing they did in the seventh gen, even if they ended up mismanaging those series like Dead Space by the end. They can't keep coasting on the same IP forever, especially when many are basically dead now.

BioWare needs to be given a lot of time to make Mass Effect 4 a hit. Dragon Age should've been a slam dunk after Inquisition's sales and it feels like it's all on the line now. Beyond that? Make a new IP, or even give them something licensed to make (KoTOR was amazing).

Warner Bros Games have restructured into divisions based around some of their more successful IP, which some think might hint at a future sell off. If I were EA, i'd scoop up Harry Potter again if the opportunity presented itself (Hogwart's Legacy was massive) and Game of Thrones. BioWare could make a GoT RPG.

Battlefield appears to be getting back on track now they have Zampella working on it, who has some semblance of knowing what the fuck he's doing. It really shouldn't be hard to make a compelling BF game, yet here we are.

It's confusing why Titanfall 3 hasn't been greenlit yet. Inevitably Apex Legends will decline in ten years - it peaked in 2023 and today has less than half the players. So I would position TF3 as their battle royale successor. Shouldn't be too hard as it's all the same universe. Of course it should also have a big budget single player campaign and traditional multiplayer too. Lots of potential to be a serious COD competitor.

They need to get on Sims 5 yesterday. Games like InZoi are coming out and threatening to beat them at their own game, like Cities Skylines did with SimCity. You know EA have anxiety about the competition when Maxis are putting out surveys asking people explicitly what they think about InZoi.

Skate looks rotten and after seeing the playtest footage i'd just pull the plug. 5 years later and it looks worse than the Xbox 360 games. I would honestly just shelve the Need for Speed brand too. The last few games haven't been great and Unbound did particularly poorly in sales.

Burnout on the other hand, if they bring that back with the open world structure, could do well. Open world driving games like Forza Horizon and even The Crew are very popular. Paradise Remastered did pretty well in sales, even topping the UK charts. Criterion also aren't totally dead yet. Relegated to a Battlefield support studio now but i'm sure would be thrilled to work on the series again.

EA also have Codemasters who they can help work on it. In fact rumor was a Criterion x Codemasters racing game was on the cards but got cancelled. WRC was so bad i'm glad they aren't attempting another. I am hoping they hang onto the F1 license though, as F1 25 was great and there's potential as a yearly franchise given the popularity of F1 now, if only they'd stop mismanaging it. Their new engine with the path tracing looks incredible and would be a next-gen showpiece.

This all probably sounds a lot like a wishlist but I think it's fairly realistic.

 

[xrnzaaas]

Every company needs a CEO, but it is definitely not a good look when an exec is being rewarded with a pay increase and bonuses when the company's situation is getting worse.

Western companies need to see what Nintendo or South Korean studios are doing - keeping their skilled employees happy and rewarding their successes so they'll be motivated to continue doing a good job.

 

[Parazels]

 

[Shifty1897]

Developers yes, absolutely, quadruplely so in the US. The median wage is dragged down by secretaries, maintenance, janitors, QA, paid interns, and low level office administration staff.

I work for a software developer as a senior engineer and I don't make that much. US Tech jobs are dwindling these days due to layoffs over AI and outsourcing to India. Employers know we don't have anywhere to go and as a consequence have been reducing raise percentages year after year after year. Most of my coworkers this year didn't get enough of a raise to beat inflation, so they're now effectively making less than they were a year ago.