How several employees at the company reacted to a single-player social media firestorm.
You might remember video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA) facing criticism last week for a harmless but baffling tweet sent by the official brand account.Â
Piggybacking off a popular Twitter meme format â this person is perfect but (insert superficial character flaw here) â the likely intent of EA’s tweet was something like âthis person is cool, but we canât play games together.âÂ
The message received? Single-player games are rubbish.
What makes the tweet particularly confusing is many of EAâs own studios are currently making single-player games, and many of the publisherâs most beloved titles are also solo experiences. In the past, the studio has also canceled projects because they donât contain a multiplayer component. Â
It might have been a daft joke, but thereâs history and context there â especially from a company that constantly publishes multiplayer games jammed with some of the most egregious monetization methods. FIFA Ultimate Team allows you to build your dream soccer team if youâve got the cash for it. Star Wars Battlefront 2âs loot boxes were such a mess that the team had to rework the entire progression system.Â
The tweet in question hit EAâs Slack within an hour after it was sent, landing in the channel for the companyâs social media teams, according to two sources who work at EA (we have verified the exchanges and screenshots of the Slack messages).Â
Initially, employees pointed out how the tweet was getting a negative reaction on social. But as the tweet started getting more traction, EA employees shared replies from other industry folks, including indie publisher Annapurna Interactive telling the company it “shoulda kept this in the drafts” and influencer Jacksepticeye saying, “Theyâre a 10 but thought this tweet was a good idea.”Â
âAs the negative reactions grew, and more of us began being more assertive, a plan was put together â very haphazardly! â to have other internal studios reply to that tweet,â one of our sources explained. âThey were desperately trying to turn things into a positive. Even people working on multiplayer games didn’t like it.âÂ
There was a call to action in the Slack channel featuring an “all hands on deck” plan asking social managers to workshop replies where EA studios would publicly ridicule their publisher online. The idea was to get more attention on the tweet, then use it to highlight some of EAâs single-player games. They wanted to flip the narrative and turn it into a marketing win.Â
Some EA employees pointed out that the âroasting EA strategyâ would feed into the âbig, bad EAâ narrative that even their own studios and franchises don’t like them.
Multiple social media managers opted out straight away, according to our sources. With a lack of solidarity, the plan fell apart.Â
âThe most agreed-on idea was to take responsibility for it and apologize,â one source explained. That ended up coming in a different form.Â
So how did the original tweet come about?
Thereâs actually a good reason for this, according to our two sources: The main EA account isnât actually managed by EA’s internal social brand or communications teams.
Following the tweet, EA is hosting roundtable discussions and meetings with executives who were angry about it since some studios saw the tweet as an insult to them.
âIâm 99 percent sure the person who posted the tweet and their manager donât even know about the single-player games comment from a decade ago,â said one of our sources, referencing EA Games label president Frank Gibeauâs infamous 2010 comment about the death of the single-player game.
âTheyâre all new and most of them, to my knowledge, arenât really game industry people. The person who posted that tweet didnât know and wasnât supported properly to ensure something like this didnât happen.”
The person who wrote the tweet isnât to blame for the controversy â the blame lies in company politics. The official EA account should be operated alongside all the studio accounts, and run by a team that knows games and the history behind the company theyâre representing. If not, someone should at least be overseeing the operation. When your company brings in $789 million in revenue per year, you should really have the basics down.Â
We’ve reached out to EA for comment.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.Â
[mm-video type=video id=01g6r10cr4vmj45v47an playlist_id=none player_id=none image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01g6r10cr4vmj45v47an/01g6r10cr4vmj45v47an-a85da5dde8af07342d5574671d0f45a4.jpg]
[listicle id=1922739]