EA CEO Got a $38M Payday While Battlefield 6 Devs Were Laid Off

The Numbers Are in, and They Are Striking

EA’s fiscal year 2026 SEC filing has made its way into the public record, and the headline figure is hard to sit with. According to reporting by IGN, CEO Andrew Wilson took home $38,649,984 in total compensation for the year. As PC Gamer first pointed out, that represents an $8 million increase from the prior year, and the filing is explicit about why: Battlefield 6.

The document credits the game’s performance for helping EA meet company objectives, describing a “high-quality launch” characterized by “positive critical reviews and stable services and gameplay.” It goes further, stating that the title’s “highly successful launch” helped the company maintain resilience in an “unpredictable external environment.” That is corporate language for a genuinely impressive result. Battlefield 6 was the highest-selling game of 2025, beating out Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and NBA 2K26. It sold more than seven million copies in its first three days and topped sales charts on both Xbox and PC.

By any measure, that is a triumph for the franchise.

The Layoffs That Followed

Here is where the story gets complicated. In March 2026, roughly five months after the most successful launch in Battlefield franchise history, EA laid off an undetermined number of employees across all of its Battlefield teams. The company framed the cuts as an effort to “better align” itself around “what matters most to our community.”

The people who built the game that generated those record-breaking numbers, that earned Wilson his raise, were out of jobs before the fiscal year filing was even published. The timing is not a secret or a buried detail. It is simply the sequence of events, laid out plainly.

EA’s situation has also shifted significantly at the ownership level. In 2025, the company was acquired by a private investor group in a $55 billion deal, according to IGN. That group includes Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners, who collectively now hold 100% ownership of the company. How that ownership structure shapes future decisions around staffing and compensation remains to be seen.

Where Battlefield 6 Stands Right Now

Despite the turbulence off the field, the game itself keeps moving. Season 4 is bringing a collaboration with Top Gun in August, featuring two fighter jets, character skins with full voice acting, and what sounds like a genuine attempt to keep the player base engaged.

In June, IGN spoke with Ariel Giovannetti, Seasonal and Competitive Creative Lead at Motive, Battlefield Studios, who acknowledged the community’s role in shaping the game’s direction. “I hope the roadmap shows that we are listening, that we are working towards those goals that the community is setting for us, but at the same time we’re moving responsively because Battlefield is huge,” he said. He added that the team’s goal was to show fans that the future is bright and that meaningful changes are coming.

Season 3 apparently landed well enough that the team feels good about where things stand. The reception to the game overall has had its bumps since launch, but content updates have continued without interruption.

None of that changes the math in the SEC filing. A record launch helped justify a record executive payday. The developers who shipped that launch were gone before the fiscal year closed. Those two facts exist in the same document, in the same news cycle, and they do not cancel each other out.