Remember last week? It happened about 34 years ago, so if you don’t, I understand. But last Thursday, EA’s official Twitter account tweeted a bad joke about single player games that led to an internet buzz and eventually an apology from Battlefield publishing company. And apparently, EA is still dealing with angry employees who feel the tweet is an insult to them, their employees, and the games they’re making.
A new report from USA Today sheds some light on how the horrible tweet came about, the reaction to it internally within EA, the plans that were put in place to handle the situation, and the unfolding consequences of it all. A whole mess that is both confusing and funny at the same time.
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 workers began sharing all the words. complain and react angrily (some from current EA execs) appeared everywhere. As the negative reactions spiraled out of control and the debate began, the folks at EA began formulating a plan to turn the tweet into a positive. It’s not a good one.
The original plan was to make all other EA social media accounts start seeing tweets while hoping to draw more attention to different single player games publishers included in the works. But some employees have pointed out that this “baked EA strategy” will only reinforce the online narrative that EA’s own studios and teams hate the company. And so, after many social media regulators backed that plan, it fell apart.
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“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 infamous 2010 quote from then-EA Games president Frank Gibeau, stating that the single-player games were “over.”)
Furthermore, that source said that the staff running the Twitter account are “all new” and most of them are “not really in the gaming industry” and may not know anything about the long history. , EA’s bad with single-player games.
It seems a myth that the official Twitter account of one of the world’s largest video game publishers is not run by people with knowledge of video games and the industry, but a reminder Again, when do big corporations make rational decisions?
