Battlefield 6 was a massive success, selling over 20 million copies since launching last October and becoming the best-selling game of 2025.
Despite the game’s financial success, Electronic Arts announced a wave of layoffs across a number of studios that worked on Battlefield 6 back in March, including DICE, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect. In light of BF6’s strong sales, the move didn’t make much sense then, and it makes less sense today with new information unveiled.
Thanks to a new fiscal report required for all publicly traded companies, we now know that EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson made a fat $38.7 million bonus thanks in large part to BF6’s success. President of EA Entertainment Laura Miele made $13.7 million, and CFO Stuart Canfield made $11.3 million, on top of their salaries, in stock awards and bonus payments. And that’s just a few of them named in the report.
And yet, many of the hard-working people who literally made the game with their talents and expertise in actual game dev got canned almost five months ago. Many of them are still looking for jobs. But that matters not to the C-suite executives who reaped all of the benefits, I suppose.
“We’ve made select changes within our Battlefield organization to better align our teams around what matters most to our community,” an EA spokesperson said at the time of the layoffs. “Battlefield remains one of our biggest priorities, and we’re continuing to invest in the franchise, guided by player feedback and insights from Battlefield Labs.”
To be quite blunt, this sickens me to no end. It’s genuinely disgusting. Greed knows no bounds when it comes to the gaming industry (and everything else, at this point), and it truly feels like it’s all a lose-lose situation unless you’re at the tippy-top of every chain.
Make a good game that doesn’t sell, and you can get laid off. Make a good game that sells a ton, and you can still get laid off, while a handful of people suck up all the profit. This is not sustainable.
