EA's Twitter blunder

 Someone shut EA up, please.

It's been a rough few months for the gaming world. Not in terms of the games themselves, but the people who develop them. There have been more and more stories about unsavoury work environments that either foster unhealthy quotas or are simply largely unpleasant for women due to systemic issues of- oh wait, Activision Blizzard completely exonerated itself from all that, didn't they? Guess that means absolutely none of it actually happened, despite this being an internal investigation and so literally designed from the ground up to be a self-serving con of an investigation. Oh, and Bobby Kotick is being welcomed back into the fold with open arms? Are- are you serious? My god, Activision and Blizzard just need to be wiped from the gaming market altogether, don't they? It's obvious there's too much rot in them to affect any actual lasting impact, so at this point the only disinfectant is complete dissolution. You know what we don't need at a low point like this? EA to get back on their crap again.

Oh, guess what! EA's back on their crap again!

As if summoned from the depth of Tartarus to pour brimstone and bile on the open dumpster fire which is the wider gaming industry right now, the EA social media team decided to make it their utmost mission to see how far in their own mouth they could fit their own foot without choking, and somehow made it to the back of the Eustachian tube! Although this was a Twitter diatribe, so I suppose that should really go without saying, shouldn't it? Whenever anyone willingly goes on Twitter they've already lost themselves before the word 'go', anyway they further debase themselves is just pilling ontop of that already gargantuan ignominy. Still, even then it takes a galaxy-sized illness of the brain to make a slip-up like EA's social media team did, with the history of EA that such a team should really be briefed and up to date with. But then they wouldn't have gone viral with such a terrible take, now would they?

To be explicit, the Tweet in question comes in response to a meme trend over the social media platform, which is already a recipe for disaster whenever corporations get involved in movements inherently not designed for them. No one needs Wendy to be a sassy lass on Twitter, no one cares about Radio Shacks desperate attempt to be hip and edgy whilst it flogs NFTs and no one wanted to read EA to write "They're a 10 but they only like single player games." I can't even- why would- this has to be self sabotage, right? Wanton and knowing. Because the punchline is so obvious and the backlash so predicable, so this has to be the same sort of situation as the 'bear' Tweet on Blizzard's Chinese social media account, right? Someone wanted to stir some chaos and that has to be where this came from, because otherwise I have no idea what literally anyone was thinking. I have to believe this was intentional, the alternative is that this Social Media team is deeply stupid. And no one wants to write someone else off entirely like that!

But for the sake of context, as if it's needed; EA and their opinion on Single player games has followed a bit of a... rough history; shall we say? A while back there was a boon period of Live Service games entering the mainstream so hard that every big AAA product was mandating some perfunctory online infrastructure just to try and take some cynical advantage of the Live Service model down the road, and fully single player games were being phased out almost entirely. It got to the point where EA were convincing themselves that people didn't want to play single player games anymore, and asserted that stance themselves in a much-maligned statement. Bethesda launched a whole campaign in support of single player games, (which was literally just one year before they announced their own Live Service Multiplayer game, so I guess that was for nothing) and people pushed back hard on EA's assertations. The seemingly nail in the coffin to the theory that 'Single player games are dead' came when EA's own studio, Respawn, launched a single player Star Wars game with no microtransactions or DLC called 'Jedi: Fallen Order', to sweeping success and acclaim. Which makes me a little disquiet about the whole thing, EA ran their mouth and got rewarded for being wrong, but it's a happy ending nonetheless. EA learned their lesson, single player gamers like myself got their vindication, and everyone clapped. Until EA had to come in and stick their fingers in old wounds.

Of course this went down about as well as you can imagine, with the world throwing up in disgust at one of the unabashedly worst takes EA could have mustered. It wasn't even a case of defending single player games this time around, because it's pretty much obvious to everyone with eyes that there are games that single player lovers like and games that multiplayer lovers like and you're never going to force one demographic to assimilate fully into the other. Instead it was a round-the-clock clown show with EA in the centre of well-earned clap backs from every corner of the industry. Not least of which where EA's own developers! Oh yes, those that make single player games using EA's money and return upon that investment with successes, such as Vince Zampella, head of Respawn and best bet to be the new director of Battlefield after DICE's all-but-formal resignation from the 'quality developers' club. People clowned on the Tweet, they clowned on the repeated failed multiplayer ventures that seem to be littering our store shelves recently, (some of which were published by EA, of course) and they clowned on the fact that EA had just announced a new single player game not 1 month previously!

Yes, 'Jedi: Survivor', the game that follows the break away success of their last single player outing, has been announced and is garnering significant hype from those that loved the original. I'm lukewarm on it, having enjoyed the original enough but knowing there's a big chasm of potential this series could hit if it plays it's card rights, but it's literally the only EA game that I have interest in. It's not that 'multiplayer equals bad' or anything like that, it's just that these sorts of audiences seek totally different styles of games to one another and what I seek in a action adventure game, a cohesive narrative with a strong arc and great memories on the flip side, is totally different from the constant churn of meaningless competition I want from my competitive multiplayer games. And that's not even mentioning where MMO's and Lootershooter style games fit into the equation. They can't be compared and it's idiotic to attempt to.

Now to EA's social media team's small credit they did recognise their mistake and offer a pitiful, attempted tongue-in-cheek, apology. "Actually, that makes them an Eleven!" or something to that end, but it makes for a sad conclusion to a dumb tale. Here's an idea, and I aim this at every company out there; don't have a social media team. Or at least, not a social media team who pride themselves on acting like real people to try and connect with their audience. It has never been beneficial to the point of outweighing the cringe bad marketing it drums up in the off days, and for most companies it's like a good will vacuum. Just let your official social media accounts be announcement machines and let blogs or forums be the place that personality seeps across the written screen, where it's expected and welcomed. And for the love of everyone and thing; someone shut EA the heck up!