Media: The story of one bad joke by EA about single-player games

Late last week, Electronic Arts tweeted: "He/she is a solid top ten, but only likes to play singles games". Users did not appreciate the joke. And not only them - developers from the company itself joined the indignation.

USA Today Citing two sources at EA, it is reported that shortly after publication, employees began to complain about the tweet to the team responsible for the publisher's social networks. They stated it caused a negative reaction, in particular, from bloggers and other gaming groups.

And here EA had a plan — social media managers were supposed to publicly mock their publisher on behalf of internal studios. The idea was to get more attention for the tweet and then use it to promote certain single-player "electronic" games.

"As the backlash grew and many of us became more assertive, a plan (very chaotic!) was hatched to have other internal studios EA responded to this tweet. They desperately tried to put a positive spin on the situation. Even people working on multiplayer games didn't like it."

As the employees noted, the "roasting" of EA by its own studios will only strengthen the negative image of the company, which is not liked even by its developers. As a result, some managers refused to participate, which caused the plan to fall apart.

"The best idea was to take responsibility and apologize" , - said one of the sources. As you know, in the end EA still gave back, albeit again in a joking manner.

"You might want to know how this tweet came about, because a game company should know the sentiments of gamers! The thing is, EA's Twitter account is run by people with only a superficial knowledge of the game industry.

I'm 99% sure that the tweeter and his manager don't even know about the comment about single player games from a decade ago. [Speaking of words Frank Guibaud, ex-president of the EA Games label, about the death of the "single" - Ed.] 

They're all newbies, and most of them aren't actually in the gaming industry as far as I know. The person who posted this tweet knew nothing and was not controlled so that this did not happen." - One of the sources

It ended up that EA held a series of meetings after the tweet was published. There, publishing executives were outraged by the botched joke, as some studios took it as an insult to them.