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The games industry’s highest earning CEOs listed in new report

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

The report by Games One lists 40 different companies and the compensation packages their CEOs received in 2020, all of which are six figures or more.

Of the 42 CEOs listed (Digital Bros and CD Projekt each have two joint CEOs), 27 received compensation of more than $1 million.

Total compensation, which is decided by a board of directors and ratified by a shareholder vote, can be a mixture of salary, bonus, stock and benefits.

The data was sourced from company filings and standardised to the 2020 calendar year. Companies who filed in currencies other than US dollars were converted using the average exchange rate for 2020.

Although not every major video game company’s CEO is listed in the report, the CEO who tops the list is Robert Antokol of Israeli mobile publisher Playtika, who reportedly received $372,008,176.

Behind him is Activision’s Bobby Kotick, who reportedly received over £154.6 million in compensation – around $77,300 per hour.

The CEOs on the list who received at least eight-figure compensation packages are:

  • Robert Antokol (Playtika) – $372 million
  • Bobby Kotick (Activision Blizzard) – $154.6 million
  • Andrew Paradise (Skillz) – $103.3 million
  • Andrew Wilson (EA) – $34.7 million
  • Frank Gibeau (Zynga) – $32 million
  • John Riccitiello (Unity) – $22 million
  • Strauss Zelnick (Take-Two) – $18.1 million
  • Taek-Jin Kim (NCsoft) – $15.6 million
  • Min-Liang Tan (Razer) – $10.4 million
  • Debbie Bestwick (Team17) – $10.2 million
Other notable names on the list include Yosuke Matsuda of Square Enix ($4.1 million), Hajimi Satomi of Sega ($2.9 million) and Shuntaro Furukawa of Nintendo ($2.8 million).

PlayStation and Xbox don’t appear on the list because they’re covered by the CEOs of Sony and Microsoft respectively, whereas the list is specifically based on companies that solely focus on video games.

The report also gives the median employee compensation for some of the most notable companies on the list, which enabled Games One to also figure out their pay ratio.

According to their report, the compensation granted to Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick was roughly the same as the average cost of paying 1,560 employees.
 

Ozzie666

Member
This is what is wrong with the world of gaming and why developers are way under paid and treated like crap. I'll give credit to the Eastern CEOs, their salaries seems reasonable, in real world terms. The top western CEO's salaries are just stupid, beyond stupid. It does make you feel sick in side.
 

Con-Z-epT

Live from NeoGAF, it's Friday Night!
Poor Jimbo isn't even on the list.

jim-ryan-peddles-ryan.gif
 

kanjobazooie

Mouse Ball Fetishist
How did the Team17 CEO make the top 10 list? I know the company grew a lot in the past few years thanks to their indie label and going public, but I didn't expect their CEO to get paid more than Ubisoft's.
 

NahaNago

Member
I understand that it's important that CEOs get well paid but something like 100 million for a single human being is just preposterous.

Meanwhile nearly half the world lives on less than 5.5 dollar a day.
Half the world would still live on less than 5.5 dollar a day if those CEOS didn't make 100 million since most if not all of those CEOS come from countries where they don't live on less than 5.5 dollars a day.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
The CEO of Nintendo making 2.8 million while the CEO of Activision making 154.6 million makes me want to throw up.
Yeah but look at the quality of the products… 🤨… there is a reason I nowadays make a point to force people to differentiate business and user value.
 

UnNamed

Banned
Team 17 is basically an indie dev. No, it's literally an indie dev according to their site.

But, as a publisher, they published lot of games.
 
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