EA CEO's Pay Dropped By Around $20 Million Last Year

Electronic Arts has announced how much money CEO Andrew Wilson was paid in 2020, and his total compensation dropped by around $20 million compared to the previous year.

In a proxy filing with the US government, EA said Wilson's total pay was $19,858,539, which is down from about $39 million in 2020 (via Axios). EA has since made changes to its executive pay structure and has said Wilson's 2020 pay was an "exception."

For the fiscal year 2022 that ended on March 31, Wilson's pay was 172 times more than EA's median employee wage of $115,569, the company said in the filing. This calculation covers base salary and bonuses together.

Wilson's base salary is around $1.3 million per year, and the rest comes from bonuses and performance-related achievements, among other things. In the filing, EA said the company achieved numerous targets such as releasing every game it planned to and integrating and onboarding newly acquired companies such as Codemasters, Metalhead, Glu Mobile, and Playdemic. EA also noted that its network servers were online for more than 99.65% of the time and that it improved diversity among its workforce.

EA was "slightly below target" on growth in revenue from mobile games, however. You can see the full proxy filing to get all the specifics on how EA performed in the past fiscal year.

Wilson makes a lot of money as EA's CEO, but he isn't the highest-paid gaming CEO. A ranking from market intelligence firm Games One showed that Wilson is paid less than many other gaming executives. For example, Playtika CEO Robert Antokol is reported to have made $372 million in 2020, which works out to about $186,000 per hour.

A recently laid off customer service representative for EA Austin told Kotaku that they made $15 per hour and called out EA for outsourcing its support teams to make more money.

"At the end of the day the lower-level employees were the backbone of connecting to the players and getting their passion and vision for the games done. During the pandemic EA made a huge profit and still refused to increase pay based on cost of living," the person said.

EA has a number of upcoming games set for release in the next year include F1 2022 (July), Madden NFL 23 (August), a Dead Space remake (January 2023), and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023).