Andrew Wilson became CEO of EA in 2013 with a salary of $800,000. Fast forward to 2026 and his base salary has ballooned to $1.3M with a staggering $6.5M performance bonus. But wait, it gets better.
Due to the structure of the Saudi buyout, he was paid ~$28.5M in cash for his fiscal year stock value. BUT WAIT.
To take it even further, Wilson cashed out his entire lifetime EA stock portfolio during the buyout at an estimated eye-watering $105.9M in C A S H.
Guess what else happened over the roughly 13 years of his tenure?
2014: Mythic Entertainment, the studio responsible for Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online, was shuttered.
2015: Maxis (Emeryville), the studio responsible for the SimCity and Sims franchises were shuttered. Though they kept the studio name and spun it off to milk The Sims for every last penny they can in monetization.
2017: Visceral Games, the studio responsible for the Dead Space franchise, was shuttered.
2023: An entire 6% of EA's global workforce got the axe
2024: Ridgeline Games, a studio responsible for Battlefield's narrative content, was shuttered.
2024: Another 5% of EA's global workforce was cut
2026: 120-200 developers across the Battlefield development teams were canned.
And that brings us to today, and the death of BioWare.
All-in-all, this man oversaw the displacement of well over 3,000 developers, creators and corporate EA employees across at least six studios. Not to mention the number of projects thrown into the trash-heap or reworked until there was nothing left to present.
The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund now owns ~94% of EA. They control it. And did you know, the structure in which the buyout occurred, the method in which they purchased EA, multiplied EA's debt by nearly 10x? EA essentially bought itself through taking additional debt. And all this for a windfall payday for existing stockholders and executives.
What makes anyone think that EA is still interested in delivering quality content for the gaming community, and not simply more dollar signs for the C-suite? I won’t be giving another cent to EA or the studios it swallows up and spits out.