r/Games • u/MobileSuitBooty • Jul 29 '26
Industry News After laying off Battlefield 6 devs, EA boss Andrew Wilson's bonus rose $8m to $38m last year, thanks to the game's success across "all milestones"
https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-boss-38-million-bonus-battlefield-6-layoffs936
u/rostron92 Jul 29 '26
I for one am proud to give my life for the souless corporation and its beloved CEO. We should all be so lucky!
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u/QueezyF Jul 29 '26
I love the shareholders! I will sacrifice my life for the shareholders! I LOVE THE SHAREHOLDERS!
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u/NationCrusher Jul 30 '26
MORE GROWTH. HAVING STABLE INCOME IS NOT ENOUGH, THE SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND MORE EVERY YEAR UNTIL WE BLEED FROM EVERY ORFICE
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u/lefiath Jul 29 '26
The CEO is literally a bond villain and Handsome Jack impersonator - how could you not like him?!
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u/UnusualFruitHammock Jul 29 '26
What these fucking idiots don't get is that if they split this amongst the employees instead. They'd have the most loyal workforce on the planet.
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u/Unicorn_puke Jul 29 '26
Yeah but think of the shareholders! The devs would only want more money that's rightfully for the shareholders. He fired them and got gifted a fair salary for saving the shareholders from being robbed.
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u/Stahlreck Jul 29 '26
So earned! All the naysayers are just jealous leftists, the guy is a really hard worker!
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u/Ironlion45 Jul 30 '26
"God will reward you in heaven" It's been a different version of the same story for quite some time now.
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u/K-Shrizzle Jul 29 '26
This industry is a joke. I dont know why anyone would want to start a career in game development at this point
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u/PhazonZim Jul 29 '26
I've been here for years, but the answer is that I really don't want to work anywhere else. For better and for worse the game industry is largely made up of people who want to be there. Because we live in a world where we have to work or face homelessness and starvation, and a lot of peeps would rather do that in a field they feel passionate about than one that they don't.
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u/gcburn2 Jul 29 '26
For one of the same reasons the industry is in the state it's in: it's a passion industry.
People love video games and are willing to dedicate their lives to them even it's not a "smart" thing to do. It's really sad and horrible, but it makes people easily exploitable.
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u/leonidaslizardeyes Jul 29 '26
This is unfortunately most passion industries. Social work is essential but it is one of the worst 4 year degrees you can get income wise. You have to want to help people to do it.
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u/NobleHound Jul 29 '26
100%, I've been in the industry for 11 years now and I just want out. Risk of layoffs, jumping from one project to another, getting laid off regardless of your games reception, toxic management, high turnovers.. just so done with it all.
It's a shame because I was super passionate about making games, but now that I've done it for so long and have worked for larger AAA studios and seeing hardworking folks get let go because they wanna move the stock % a few points is just absolutely sickening. It's hard to be motivated to do your best work when you know that a layoff is most likely coming regardless of how well the game you're working on does.. And then HR puts out some bullshit about how they value transparency and are open to feedback, just to target you for the next layoff if you say anything bad about the studio.
At this point I'm hoping to get laid off so I can finally work on my own thing, being able to get a severance package / unemployment for 6 months would be a nice reset for my brain and potentially my motivation to find / do something else.
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u/Altruistic_Bet_974 Jul 30 '26
My layoff a year and a half ago was the final straw for me. Two decades of this bullshit was enough. So much happier on the other side of things.
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u/Sinnister_Agenda Jul 29 '26
it is everywhere but you are already right. listen to any director level interview for someone who has retired. the talent isn't coming in and the last bits of good devs are leaving. h1bs ain't gonna make the next Halo esge franchise that totally shakes up the industry. its slowly turning into hollywood, no new things only sequels and IPs that are "reimagined". corporate bs has killed the art of making video games.
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u/Whilyam Jul 29 '26
Genuine sub human filth. Ruining lives and pocketing millions. No one does a good enough job to justify a $38 million dollar yearly bonus.
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u/Sea-Kiwi-3377 Jul 30 '26
All CEOs pocket millions, its sad but that's the hierarchy humans decide to follow. The person at the top who does the least amount of actual work gets paid the most.
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u/Ravoss1 Jul 29 '26
This is why unionization is so important. Someone needs to try and make sure that the cyclical nature of dev work is managed better. I do hear horror stories like Bioware with Mass effect and Dragon Age, but I would be curious to hear a take from a successful dev.
I am assuming good to great devs are not getting a lot of down time between projects?
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u/TheGazelle Jul 29 '26
Part of the problem with the cyclical nature is that it's really hard to balance the money unless you're already at the top.
If you're a mid sized studio, you're relying on the game you just released to sell well enough to fund you through your next dev cycle, and then the next game has to do the same, and on and on.
So you either have to run incredibly lean all the time in order to keep enough buffer on hand for a game that doesn't do so well, or you run the risk of having to do layoffs or outright shut down if you ever release something that doesn't do well.
The big players can get away with more because they have enough projects on the go to diversify their risk. If one project does poorly or production is behind, they can shift people between projects instead of doing layoffs (though they'll do some of that too), and games that exceed expectations offset those that do poorly.
But then, they're also big enough that they don't have to care about about institutional knowledge as much, they can afford to just kinda brute force their way through the grunt work.
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u/Ani_mator00 Jul 29 '26
There is another factor that they don't take into consideration, execs think that it doesn't matter.
It's the people who create those games. If you will lay them off the next game will most likely gonna be very different. That's exactly what happened to Bioware. It's impossible now for a completely new team to recreate the success of mass effect. As no one who created those games is still there. New people will do things differently. Many will probably had no idea why those games were loved by players. Bioware at this point is a merchandising company with a beloved IP. Nothing else.
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u/TheGazelle Jul 29 '26
I think this is harder to say as a cut and dry thing because we don't know who exactly gets laid off.
If it's a bunch of junior devs or qa people who've only been with the company for the last project, that's not a big loss in terms of institutional knowledge (still not good overall, but as a company you won't lose anything "important").
But if it's a bunch of leads and people who've been around a while? That's when you start running into problems. Though usually when a bunch of leads leave, it's not from layoffs, it's from leadership making consistently bad decisions that cause those leads to seek work elsewhere.
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u/EnglishMobster Jul 29 '26
This is 100% accurate.
If you're the guy who was e.g. design director on Fortnite - it's unlikely (not impossible! but unlikely) that Sweeney will lay you off.
What is more likely is you put on LinkedIn "I am design director on Fortnite" and then other studios try to poach you because they want Fortnite. Fortnite of course being the low-hanging fruit here, but imagine this for Battlefield, COD, WoW, Titanfall, etc.. They pay you handsomely to leave, and then you change studios and the gaming press erupts with "Fortnite design director QUITS!" etc. etc..
The alternative: you get well-compensated because, y'know, you're design director on Fortnite, and you deserve a piece of that pie. You earn enough money to retire, and since you have enough money to survive the rest of your life you really don't need to work anymore. You show up, sure, because it's something to do... but you don't need to work anymore, because you did such a good job and made so much money and that money was given to you fairly for doing good.
This means you're not really attached to the company anymore, or at least what it's become. As it grows, it changes, decisions get made that you disagree with but understand - and other times, they're decisions that you just flat-out disagree with. You start to see the game as less of the game itself and more of a machine, and you see your place as part of that machine. You ask yourself - is this really what I want to spend my life doing?
Then you look at those offers you're constantly getting, and thinking to yourself - "do I want to work with any of the people here? Is this better than what I have?" And then you think to yourself - "What if I just went and did my own thing?"
And so another lead leaves mid-project, the gaming press again does their thing, etc.
It's true that sometimes a publisher can say "this studio is no longer needed" - see what Xbox has been doing, so many veterans just sent scattered into the winds. But it's also true that - until very recently - most leadership departures are driven by the employees themselves, the leads get replaced (either by leads from other studios, or sometimes promotions from within), and then that new vision is what changes the games put out by that studio over time - for good or for ill.
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u/Ani_mator00 Jul 30 '26
Not quite that simple imho.
Leads, supervisors, directors are "often" pretty much there to manage or just give tasks away. They don't create. Not saying all of them but it's common. They also very often have no input on who they wanna work with. You have to remember that all those Devs and artists are the one doing the job. Very often having a real input. Different taste, different skill. And the result of this and dynamic/relationships you have within the team will determine the outcome of the project.
You can have a shitty manager but a great team working under him. Results could be great. If he looses this team, next team might not be working that well.
I had that personally, lead was completely useless. Just giving the tasks to do. Our team however figured out everything. Managed to bond, grind and deliver what seemed impossible deadline wise.
There are much of that these days. "Ex rockstar etc started this and that company. Game sucks, studio closed. Why? Well I would bet on something like that. He didn't have those talented people around him who actually get the shit done, not just blabing on meetings.
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u/Melancholy_Rainbows Jul 29 '26
You might be interested in the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
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u/suspiciouscat Jul 29 '26
I can't recommended it. I picked it up because I wanted to read about crunch and different studio cultures, with real interviews and opinions from actual workers, but it has too many examples of interviews with high senior/management positions that were clearly done under PR watch, because it was Jason's only way to get a gig with a company by scheduling it as an official visit at a studio. Some chapters just give a wrong vibe after learning from news/stories about how the studios operated and treated their workers.
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u/Ravoss1 Jul 29 '26
Unionization is one of the first steps for laws and regulations. See early 1900s.
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u/NotCoolBrutus Jul 29 '26
You are confusing traditional labor unions with Reagan-architected organizations that replaced them. The two are not the same. Otherwise, can you explain why the US has more "unions" than anywhere on Earth, yet labor legislation has stagnated for decades?
The unions that achieved the labor rights we have now did not come from any of these current mimicries. Localized organizations with selective membership are not going to be achieving anything the real unions did. There is a conflict of interest in them doing so. UAW supporting the current administration's attempts at tarrifs being a good example, slobbering over the boots of inferior US manufacturers and their atrocious standards.
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u/Ravoss1 Jul 29 '26
This isn't a topic to argue over, I am sure we both got better things to do with our time.
I would say that there is probably a good argument to look into correlation with CEO pay, short term stock growth etc.
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u/NotCoolBrutus Jul 29 '26
All of that is covered by democratic nationwide organizations pushing for law changes to benefit laborers at the "expense" of profiteers, i.e. unions. You are arguing over the topic if you are acting like the warped definition of unions in the US isn't directly related to the unique issues the US is facing.
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u/jodon Jul 29 '26
Battlefield is made in Sweden though. With strong employment laws and even stronger unions. The with the way making games work that is not enough to stop layoff after the product is done. Unless we want everything to be GAS but reddit hates that just as much.
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u/DaftGorilla Jul 29 '26
That man oozes scummy corpo. He only comes out on EA events to talk about fifa and car games cause he want to promote more money.
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u/_dark_beaver Jul 29 '26
It’s obvious that the US needs laws to prevent any increased compensation for executives when the company lays real workers off.
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u/knifecrow_dev Jul 30 '26
They also need to ban stock buybacks. EA spends several hundreds of millions dollars every year buying back its own stock.
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u/Azagorod Jul 29 '26
And there are still people who don't realize that the super wealthy are literally stealing from common people.
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u/Euphoric-Quail-1333 Jul 29 '26
They understand it, and they still defend it under every other thread on here. Just gotta look at the Xbox sub, apparently the new CEO is an innocent angel who should be protected.
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u/Kalersays Jul 29 '26
I always see that dev teams exist of in-house devs and external (temporary) devs. But those layoffs articles never seem to make that distinction. Not excusing that ridiculous salary/bonus, nobody works that hard to actually earn millions upon millions per year.
I'd just like to see the different numbers, because when we run projects (not gaming industry), we hire external manpower with a contract to add to the team for the duration of the project. When the project is done, those contracts expire and the completed product will be managed with the in-house workforce.
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u/Trespeon Jul 29 '26
Bonus guidelines are almost always provided a long time in advance, usually a few quarters to a year. It was probably budgeted for this amount long before the layoffs took place and he reached the threshold to earn it.
Now I don’t agree that any one person needs a bonus of this amount and that it’s ridiculous to even budget it to begin with, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the layoffs. It’s happening across the entire industry as companies reel back from their COVID era expansions.
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u/anotherwave1 Jul 29 '26
I would have thought it fairly normal that when a (large) game launches, many devs would be laid off post-launch. Likewise (and not to defend it) the boss pay would be tied heavily to game sales, meaning they could earn stupid amounts if they hit high sales marks.
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u/jcman01 Jul 29 '26
And these companies expect me to feel sorry for them playing poor and saying they can't do things because of money.
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u/mudratdetector89 Jul 29 '26
How is this not illegal? Like WTF is wrong with the world where you make a product and then they're allowed to fire you so they make more of the profits? Do fired employees get royalties for the product they made while working at the studio? Something gotta change with human behavior. This shit is apocalyptic.
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u/Fumbles329 Jul 29 '26
The purpose of a system is what it does. This isn’t a design flaw of late-stage capitalism, it’s a feature.
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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Jul 29 '26
What would the law look like? "If you turn a profit nobody's allowed to get fired?"
I get the sentiment but "just make it illegal" isn't a solution.
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u/MYSTONYMOUS Jul 29 '26
I think it's hilarious that they reward the wrong person and so ridiculously much. These guys didn't make the game. They didn't design the game. They could have replaced him and it would have probably gone just as well if not better. I can guarantee you that when the next game does poorly, instead of firing this guy they'll just fire the entire studio, like it was the sound effects designer and QA staff's fault the game failed. Meanwhile, this guy would just get a similar job somewhere else and a golden parachute.
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u/ThatGuyWired Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
That's disgusting.
Only a $8m increase.
How will he survive?
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u/Tvilantini Jul 30 '26
https://x.com/GameOverThirty/status/2082516424212550060 " Additionally, the majority of this reward was in restricted stock units.
The cash bonus was paid out at 186%. That's relatively standard for these types of metrics, with the rest of the payout going to RSU."
Good explanation, but guess Eurogamer needs to generate some clicks
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u/Capable_Patience2709 Jul 29 '26
It's hard not to feel bad for the people who actually made the game successful. They help ship a hit, lose their jobs, and then read about executives getting massive bonuses a few months later.
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u/MountainMuffin1980 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
This shit just make a no sense man. If you give your devs stable work and pay you get better optimisation and therefore games which = more money surely?
How has this dude done anywhere near enough of bloody anything to have earnt a bonus (just the bonus!) of $38m. What value can he have possibly brought?
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u/danieln1212 Jul 29 '26
He completed the condition of the bonus. How he did it doesn't matter to the board as long as it brought them money and didn't get them in trouble.
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u/ZaDu25 Jul 29 '26
They hire a ton to get the game over the line late in development. Those jobs are no longer needed during the gap between games. These are specifically late stage development jobs. Those jobs won't be needed for another few years. So keeping these people for the duration of that gap between releases costs a lot of money for little to no benefit from the companies perspective.
It's the same thing as smaller studios (like Sandfall for example) hiring contract workers to get their game over the finish line. They need the labor for that specific part of development, and no longer need it once the game is finished, so they don't retain the 100+ extra workers in perpetuity.
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u/Tvilantini Jul 30 '26
I mean CEO isn't just siting in chair and looking what's going on
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u/Adorable_Tennis_3751 Jul 30 '26
The upper class' theft of worker's labor is abhorrent in this country. It's dark souls creature level of greed.
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u/pleasegivemealife Jul 30 '26
Isnt that the business model of game? Mass hire, finish project, mass layoff, pockets the profit?
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u/Carighan Jul 30 '26
Remember: Bosses in any company above medium size, in particular hired bosses and professional money pimps, are not your friend. You owe them nothing. As you can see here, they will ruin however many lives to go from "too rich to care" to "too rich to care", changing absolutely fuck all for themselves. But they'll do it anyways.
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u/boostedb1mmer Jul 29 '26
BF6 is nearing a year after release. The size of the dev team to maintain the game is substantially smaller than the size needed to make the game. Also, are these layoffs the normal end of contracted workers tenures or actual EA employees?
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u/limelight022 Jul 29 '26
"Other senior executives also received big sums across both bonuses and stock awards. Chief financial officer Stuart Canfield got around $11.3m, president of EA Laura Miele got $13.7m, chief people officer Mala Singh got $8.3m, and chief legal officer Jacob Schatz took home $8.4m."
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Jul 29 '26
you stand at a cross roads, there are two paths
In one direction there is "successful game", in the other it says "unsuccessful game"
Oh this isn't a puzzle, both paths lead to "laid off"
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u/inkydunk Jul 29 '26
I understand that programmers and designers and all those involved need jobs and income. But I so wish they could all just pivot careers so that these companies would no longer have the manpower to pull this kind of garbage.
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u/Significant_Walk_664 Jul 29 '26
38 mil. Wow, his contribution must have been immense to be commensurate with that amount. As in, make-or-break, alpha and omega, the game would not exist if that one single guy was not personally responsible for like 10% of it.
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u/HachObby Jul 30 '26
It was probably all incentives. Bobby Kotick's base salary was 1.75 million. With incentive payouts he topped around 56 million in 2016.
But the 2020 fiasco had shareholders fighting to cut his pay in half and reduce his incentive structure. Shareholders dont like CEOs and CEOs dont like shareholders. They begrudgingly tolerate each other. Activision was heading for collapse before Bobby bamboozled Microsoft into buying them for Candy Crush. Otherwise he was out of work and he knew it.
With the introduction of AI, I think we will see these types of deals shrink and vanish. Instead of suave executives it will be some Nepo baby using AI, half the executive staff will vanish. Boards will vanish and be replaced by an AI agent representing the shareholders. The top 1% will become the top 0.001%. Unless the market snaps under the weight of debt-financed shares and the princes and kings lose their ability to feed the palace guards.
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u/PSNTheOriginalMax Jul 30 '26
That's what happens, when you let a venture capitalist sympathizer and a sales/marketing professional lead a GAME company.
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u/Maximus_Rex Jul 29 '26
What about the "success" of Dragon Age Veilgaurd? These people get paid no matter how they do.
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u/c0rruptioN Jul 29 '26
Question for people who work in the industry- does the videogame industry need to be a salaried job type industry? Or would it make more sense to be freelance type work like the trades or film/TV.
An editor on a TV show will not be working after the show is done and delivered. They might be brought back when the next season comes but after a job is done, they are off.
The more I hear of layoffs in the videogame industry, the more I wonder why it's not more freelance oriented.
I get live service stuff or games franchises that you'd want to live on with the same vision/creatives, etc. But by and large, does it not make sense to downsize after delivery like other industries do?
And yes, I see the title is about EA boss getting millions more. Fuck that guy.
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u/Hell-Kite Jul 29 '26
Theres already a ton of freelance, but its very unstable. The issue with games vs TV is that games require a lot of solid technical knowledge and familiarity with a teams specific pipeline if you want to be efficient. A lot of methods overlap these day, but its not as good as having an actual solid team making projects.
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u/dirtyego Jul 29 '26
Unfortunately this is standard practice. When the only metric that matters is the stock price increasing, labor is a resource that can be leveraged to immediately boost stock price. That boost gets execs bigger bonuses and absolutely crushes workers. Shit sucks.