Last fiscal year, Andrew Wilson walked away with $38,649,984. In March, the developers responsible for the game behind that figure were shown the door.
That’s the entire story, and it doesn’t improve with scrutiny.
Electronic Arts submitted the filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the composition holds few surprises: the bulk of Wilson’s package came via stock awards, a non-equity incentive plan and “other compensation.” The total sits more than $8 million higher than his previous year’s pay.
The rest of the C-suite did fine too
Wilson wasn’t the only one paid handsomely. EA’s other named executive officers landed at or near eight figures: over $11.3 million for Stuart Canfield, over $13.7 million for Laura Miele, over $8.4 million for Mala Singh and over $8.5 million for Jacob Schatz.
Net revenue for the fiscal year came in at $7.531 billion, a 9% increase.
“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.
Go back to that opening phrase. Talented teams.
Battlefield 6 didn’t just do well, it beat Call of Duty
To be fair, the game backed up the boast. Battlefield 6 delivered the franchise’s biggest launch ever and became the first entry in the series to outsell a Call of Duty game released in the same year, a claim nobody has been in a position to make since somewhere around the Obama administration.
Analyst Rhys Elliott pegged it as the top-selling game in the U.S. across 2025, with sales passing 20 million copies by December.
Then came March, when EA cut an unspecified number of developers spread across Criterion, Dice, Ripple Effect and Motive Studios. Internally, the company framed it as 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.”
Reports indicate Battlefield 6 ran past its budget. That overage had to be absorbed by someone, and it plainly wasn’t the executives writing the memos.
Everyone else in the industry is bleeding
Zoom out and it looks worse rather than better. Mass layoffs have swept through publishers industry-wide, including Xbox cutting over 3,000 employees. Hardware shortages, climbing development budgets and a release schedule with no slack have put pressure on the whole sector.
Set against that backdrop, Battlefield 6 was a rare clean win. A record-setting year, carried by a franchise that finally connected. When even the successes conclude with job cuts, the arithmetic isn’t failing by accident.
And the ownership question is still open
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is partway through a $55 billion acquisition of EA, a deal that also brings in private equity fund Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. Approval from the European Commission arrived recently, pushing the transaction nearer the finish line.
Whoever ends up holding the keys takes over a company that has just demonstrated it can print money and still conclude that the developers are the costly part.