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

A new report has revealed how much the CEOs of 40 major video game companies were paid in compensation during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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).

Further reading

1

Bobby Kotick is reportedly willing to resign ‘if he can’t quickly fix’ Activision Blizzard issues

The criticised exec is said to have fielded questions from leaders last week

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.