Andrew Wilson's mega payday vs. everyone else's pay cut

With a 16% raise and stock awards in the tens of millions, the pay gap between leadership and the people actually making the games has never looked starker.

No, life isn't fair—sure. But some things are genuinely hard to ignore. Like EA boss Andrew Wilson's record-breaking pay bump: a staggering 30.5 million USD, which is 5 million USD more than the previous year, and an increase of around 16%. Not exactly peanuts: a base salary of 1.3 million dollars, about 26 million in stock awards, over 3 million in bonuses, and another 700K in various compensations like life insurance and security.

Compared to regular employees, it suddenly gets really ugly—those folks took a hit as the average salary dropped sharply from 150K to 120K. And that's not even counting the mass layoffs that EA has carried out internally.

The extreme gap means Wilson earned about 260 times more than the average EA employee, despite a year riddled with misfires like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Battlefield, and EA Sports FC, which has also seen a drop in popularity. Critics argue this is symptomatic of the games industry at large—where execs cash in while developers are laid off. A system where profit and shareholders come first, and the people who actually build the games are left behind.

So tell us—what's reasonable, and what's plain, unfiltered greed?