EA’s C-suite declines executive bonuses following 2019 financial performance

EA hasn’t had the best week, what with sending its representatives before a UK parliament committee to insist that lockboxes are totally fine, healthy, fun, and ethical, to the boos and hisses of gamers around the globe. But the company might make up for that a bit thanks to its recent SEC filing, which as PC Games Insider noted shows that the company’s top brass are passing some cash down to the peons. Apparently, the C-suite at EA has determined that since the company didn’t quite produce the financial performance it should’ve, performance-based payouts for the company’s executives will be pushed into employee bonus pool instead.

“Given the Company’s 2019 financial performance, and in order to maintain alignment with our pay-for-performance executive compensation philosophy, our CEO and his staff (including the NEOs) requested that they receive no performance cash bonus award for fiscal 2019. The Board (in the case of Mr. Wilson) and the Compensation Committee (in the case of the other NEOs) accepted this request. The bonus funding that would have been allocated to our CEO and his staff (including the NEOs) were contributed to the overall Company bonus pool.”

Of course, as PCGI points out, the total of bonuses being skipped and handed down by the board amounts to just over $5.5M, which isn’t really very much considering that CEO Andrew Wilson will make $18.2M for the 2019 fiscal year all by himself, while the median employee will bring home a bit more than $91K. (We presume, given the info under the section “FISCAL 2019 PAY RATIO,” that this means the legal definition of salaried employee, not contractors, which can skew numbers like that.)