As you know, the video game industry is experiencing a moment of severe crisis, between mass layoffs and closures of entire studios. Just in the last few days we have received news of the closure of Pisces Interactive, the studio behind Alone in the Dark, and Galvainc Games, the studio behind Wizard With a Gun. In the last twelve months, more than 10,000 developers have lost their jobs, despite the fact that large companies in the sector continue to declare very high revenues.
Electronic Arts is one of the publishers that has fired the mostwith nearly seven hundred developers cut since the beginning of the year, despite the record profits guaranteed by its live services, especially the EA Sports FC series. However, it seems that the crisis has not affected the executives, who overall took home 60 million dollars in salaries in the last fiscal year, with CEO Andrew Wilson pocketing a whopping $25 million.
Fabulous salary
Wilson’s salary consists of $1.3 million in base salary, $20 million in stock options, $3.44 million from a non-equity incentive plan and $500,000 in “personal safety benefits.”
Consider that this year it earned $5 million more than last year because, according to what Game Developer discovered by reading the company’s financial reports, it achieved all its “key strategic and operational objectives” and successfully oversaw the launch of the EA Sports FC brandafter abandoning the FIFA license.
In short, Electronic Arts is doing really well and maybe Wilson even deserves that money, but the figure clashes greatly with that of the 670 layoffs. The average salary of EA employees last year was $148,704, naturally skewed by executive pay (regular employees get much less). Despite this, Wilson took 20 times more. Not bad, really, because ultimately capitalism is also this: successes are always yours, while disasters always belong to others.
