EA vs Single-player Games; Not Only Gamers Got Irritated
EA has succeeded in quite a feat. The company's „humorous” Tweet annoyed not only gamers and influencers, but also studios owned by the publisher.
Electronic Arts doesn't have luck with social media. This is vividly demonstrated by a recent post on single-player games, which brought the company the resentment not only of Internet users, but also of its own employees (including the management). The causes and consequences of this little disaster are discussed by USA Today.
The article was based on the testimony of two alleged EA employees, including screenshots they sent of the publisher's internal channel on Slack messenger, where they were said to have drawn attention to growing discontent over the unfortunate tweet. Later, employees also showed critical responses from other developers, as well as influencers.
EA's self-deprecation as a lifeline
It was not long before they began to advise on a way out of this uninteresting situation. There was even a proposal that the entry should also be ridiculed by Electronic Arts studios. In theory, this was supposed to change the whole narrative by drawing attention to single player games created by the publisher's developers.
Even leaving aside the coarseness of this plan, employees pointed out one small problem with this "brilliant" idea. Such a move would reinforce EA's image as a publisher hated even its own studios. Such a narrative often appears in online discussions anyway, but it's one thing to hear statements from random Internet users, and another to post on developer's official accounts.
This is probably why most community relations managers did not support the proposal and ultimately stopped at publishing an apology, which, by the way, was also accepted... not quite as enthusiastically as Electronic Arts might have hoped.
In addition, the publisher is holding meetings and "round table" discussions with studio executives who felt offended by the post as insulting their projects and employees.
New employee doesn't know the history of EA and single player games?
Both unfortunate posts - the original one and the apology - were supposed to come off so poorly for the same reason. According to USA Today's sources Electronic Arts' social media accounts are not run by employees of the company's third-party teams, but by "new" people almost certainly with no major ties to the video game industry.
Probably - according to one of the interlocutors of the website - the author of the unfortunate tweet has no idea about the memorable statement made by Frank Gibeau, the president of Electronic Arts, who in 2010 declared the end of single-player games, as it were, giving rise to the stereotype "EA does not like the single player." By the same token, the employee didn't realize that joking about single-player titles was a risky game:
"They’re all new [employees - ed. note] and most of them, to my knowledge, aren’t really game industry people. The person who posted that tweet didn’t know and wasn’t supported properly to ensure something like this didn’t happen.
I’m 99 percent sure the person who posted the tweet and their manager don’t even know about the single-player games comment from a decade ago."
