Late last week, Electronic Arts tweeted:“He/she – for a hard ten, but only likes to play
USA Today, citing two EA sourcesreports that soon after the publication, employees began to complain about the tweet to the team in charge of the social networks of the publisher. Like, he caused a negative reaction, in particular from bloggers and other gaming teams.
They're a 10 but they only like playing single-player games
– Electronic Arts (@EA) June 30, 2022
And then EA came up with a plan - social media managerswere supposed to publicly ridicule their publishing house on behalf of internal studios. The idea was to draw more attention to the tweet and then use it to promote certain single-player "electronic" games.
“As the backlash grew and many of us became more insistent, a (very chaotic!) plan was made to have other internal studiosEAresponded to this tweet. They desperately tried to put a positive spin on the situation. Even the people who work on multiplayer games didn't like it.”
As the employees noted, the “calcination” of EA by its ownstudios will only strengthen the negative image of the company, which even its developers do not like. As a result, some managers refused to participate, which is why the plan collapsed.
“The most agreeable idea was to take responsibility and apologize”, – said one of the sources. As you know, in the end EA finally gave back, albeit again in a humorous manner.
Growth is well protected. We’ll take this L cause playing single player games actually makes them an 11. https://t.co/PNg4FKOgfB
– Electronic Arts (@EA) July 1, 2022
“Perhaps you want to know howthis tweet appeared because a gaming company should know the mood of gamers! The fact is that EA's Twitter account is run by people who are superficially familiar with the gaming industry.
I'm 99% sure the tweeter and his manager don't even know about the comment about single player games from ten years ago. [It's about wordsFrank Gibo, ex-president of the EA Games label, about the death of the “single” - Ed.]
They are all newbies, and most of them, as far asI know are not actually part of the gaming industry. The person who posted this tweet did not know anything and was not controlled to prevent this from happening.”One of the sources
Ended up after posting the EA tweetheld a series of meetings. There, publishing executives were outraged because of an unsuccessful joke, as some studios took it as an insult in their direction.