Other EA criticised for appearing to mock people who ‘only like single-player games’

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On Thursday, the FIFA and Battlefield publisher put its own spin on a popular meme by posting: “They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games”.

The message, while likely intended as a light-hearted joke, received an overwhelming negative response in its more than 7,000 replies.

Jacksepticeye, the Irish YouTuber with nearly 30 million subscribers, wrote: “They’re a 10 but thought this tweet was a good idea.”

Developer Obsidian sub-tweeted EA, writing: “Single player is dope. Multiplayer is dope. Games are rad.”

Responses even came from EA’s own employees. Vince Zampella, head of EA’s Respawn Entertainment – creator of single-player games Titanfall and Jedi: Fallen Order – replied with a hand-on-face emoji, while the design director of Jedi: Survivor simply posted a wink.

BioWare writer Patrick Weekes added: “Thinking about working until midnight for the better part of a year to help ship Mass Effect 2”.

And former Dragon Age series designer Sebastian Hanlon wrote: “’Remember,’ the Community Manager in the group, waiting for our flight to board, said, ‘just be more careful than usual about what you say while we’re there; you represent the whole company, whether you like it or not. Even if you _think_ you’re ‘outside the show’.’”

The most high-profile criticism came from Zach Mumbach, who was formerly a producer for games such as Dead Space 2 and Dante’s Inferno at Visceral Games, the studio closed by EA in 2017.

“This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off ~100 great developers because we were making a single player game,” he wrote in a message retweeted over one thousand times.

“Also, if you break game rating scores down to a 10 point scale most EA games are a solid 6 or 7. Not because the developers are bad but because ea the corporation forces them to rush games out. EA corporate leadership wouldn’t know what a ’10’ looks like in terms of video games.”

Hours after EA posted the original tweet, it appeared to backpedal following the criticism, posting: “Roast well deserved. We’ll take this L cause playing single player games actually makes them an 11.”

The tweet was unfortunately timed given that EA has recently started making more linear single-player games, after spending a significant period dismissing their viability.
 
Some of their best rated games are single-player ones like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Not sure what they were thinking with such a stupid tweet
 
I wonder what will happen to EA's social media staff after mocking many of their customers and gamers who enjoy single player games.
 
Yeah and that didnt turn out too well for them in the long run, lol.
 
read more from kotaku:

According to the report, an hour after the tweet went live last week, it landed in EA’s internal Slack chat room, where employees and social media staff began sharing all the roasts and angry responses (some from current EA execs) that were popping up all over. As negative reactions spiraled out of control and the discourse began, folks at EA began formulating a plan to turn the tweet into a positive. It just wasn’t a good one.

The initial plan was to get all the other EA social media accounts to start dunking on the tweet while hopefully drawing more attention to the various single-player games the publisher has in the works. But some staff pointed out that this “roasting EA strategy” would just reinforce the narrative online that EA’s own studios and teams hate the company. And so, after many social media managers backed out of that plan, it fell apart.

“The most agreed-on idea was to take responsibility for it and apologize,” one source told USA Today. However, this apology ended up being an equally embarrassing tweet saying people who play single-player games were actually 11s."

But while the internet moved on to its next target, higher-ups at EA are continuing to deal with the fallout from the tweet. USA Today reports that the FIFA publisher is hosting roundtable discussions and team meetings with executives who felt the joke was an insult to the games they’re working on and the staff making them.

As for how this happened, well it turns out EA’s official Twitter account isn’t run by anyone from EA or its social teams. According to sources who spoke to USA Today, it’s very likely that the person who tweeted the soon-to-be-infamous joke had no idea how poorly it would be received online.

“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,” one source told USA Today. (The comment they reference was the infamous 2010 quote from then-EA Games president Frank Gibeau, saying that single-player games were “finished.”)

Further, that source says that the staff running the Twitter account are “all new” and that most of them “aren’t really game industry people” and likely had no idea about EA’s long, bad history with single-player games.
 
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