When MBAs Take Over: EA, Battlefield 6, and the $38.6 Million Bonus Built on Layoffs

This story has been sitting in my group chats for days and I can’t let it go, because it’s the cleanest example I’ve seen in a while of exactly what’s wrong with this industry right now.

Okay, But First: Battlefield 6 Is Actually Good

Let’s give credit where it’s due, because this isn’t a story about a bad game. Battlefield 6 has genuinely outperformed anything EA has put out in years — it was the best-selling game in the US in all of 2025, it beat Call of Duty, and it moved 7 million copies in its first three days. That’s not spin. That’s the actual number.

The community response has been more mixed — there was real frustration early on around monetization, movement, and content pacing — but the important part is that EA has actually been listening. New maps, adjustments to the things people were loudest about, an actual roadmap instead of silence. It genuinely feels like the first Battlefield game since Battlefield 1 — which came out back in October 2016, for reference, so we are talking about a full decade of nothing else scratching that itch — to feel like a true Battlefield game again. The game itself is on the right track.

The Record-Breaking Success Didn’t Save the People Who Built It

Here’s where it turns. EA itself has pointed to Battlefield 6’s success as a major factor behind the company’s $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, alongside Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. The game is, by EA’s own accounting, one of the biggest reasons this deal exists.

And yet back in March, EA laid off around 300 employees across Battlefield Studios — DICE, Criterion, Ripple Effect, and Motive. The teams that made the thing. When IGN asked EA to explain it, the company’s spokesperson called it a decision “to better align our teams around what matters most to our community.”

Yes, the game has been getting better since then. But EA spent the first stretch after launch trying to ram their own priorities down the community’s throat, and it was only once that clearly wasn’t working that they started actually making the adjustments that are now driving the game’s continued success and the goodwill it’s earning back. The improvement is real. It’s also reactive, not generous.

Even with the layoffs walked back into a friendlier word like “realignment” — the lesson is the same. Success will never protect you from the greed of your corporate overlords.

Meanwhile, at the Top

So: people were laid off. The game found real success. People are still gone. And all the while, the CEO and the rest of the C-suite pulled in record salaries and bonuses — on the backs of the very people they let go.

EA’s own FY26 filing puts numbers on it. CEO Andrew Wilson’s total compensation came in at $38,649,984 — up more than $8.1 million, about 27%, from the year before. That’s 305 times what EA’s own median employee made that year. He wasn’t alone: CFO Stuart Canfield pulled in $11.3 million-plus, and EA Entertainment president Laura Miele got $13.7 million, while general counsel Jacob Schatz took home $8.5 million. Four executives, something like $70+ million combined, the same fiscal year 300 developers got a pink slip.

This Is Exactly What Happens When You Let MBAs in Too-Tight of Suits Start Making Decisions

Corporate greed takes over. Things get fucky. They get rich. The games suffer. The community turns on the company, and sometimes turns on itself. And somewhere in there, the actual soul of the thing — the art, the craft, the reason any of us started caring about this in the first place — gets lost.

And now the acquisition is happening. Again. Which will inevitably turn out the way it always does — siphon as much money out of the player base as possible while shipping half-finished, over-monetized games, right up until there’s nothing left to siphon.

Where This Actually Leaves Us

Gaming is struggling right now, and corporate greed is just a symptom of the real problem: a handful of massive companies dominating the entire space, squeezing every half-penny out of players’ pockets, and they’ll keep doing it until we stop letting them — or until there’s nothing left to take.

There are smaller developers and studios out there who still actually care about games as an art form, and people are already voting with their wallets in their direction. It just isn’t a wave yet. It probably never will be, honestly — too many people are chasing the hype, and too many more are completely, understandably checked out of gaming discourse because for most people this is a two-hours-a-week hobby, not a personality. That’s fair. Not everyone owes this industry their attention.

But for those of us who are in it — who actually call ourselves “gamers” — we need to start putting our money where our mouth is. Stop pre-ordering the $80 game from the company that just laid off the people who made the last one. Go find the studio that’s still trying.

When MBAs take over, this is what happens. We just watched it happen in real time, with the receipts published in a public filing.

---

Elfishchunk still plays Battlefield 6. He’s not thrilled about that math either, but here we are.