EA reportedly tried to spin its controversial Twitter post from last week, which joked at the expense of single-player games, into a way to garner artificial attention. However, many developers under the publisher weren’t happy with this idea.
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The Tweet, which read, “They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games”, unsurprisingly drew a lot of backlash, with EA posting a response shortly afterwards stating: “Roast well deserved. We’ll take this L cause playing single player games actually makes them an 11.”
They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games
— Electronic Arts (@EA) June 30, 2022
However FTW USA Today heard from a source that following its posting, a plan was put in place “to have other internal studios reply to that tweet”. This was shared around Slack channels, with social managers being asked to “workshop replies where EA studios would publicly ridicule their publisher online” as a way to try and put more eyes on EA’s single-player games.
Most social managers weren’t happy supporting the strategy, so the plan swiftly fell through. One source stated that “the most agreed-on idea was to take responsibility for it and apologise,” which came in the form of the aforementioned reply Tweet from EA.
This Tweet was an especially sore topic amongst those who had previously worked on single-player projects under EA, as well as those working on upcoming titles. This is also following controversy surrounding the poor reception of the multiplayer-only title Battlefield 2042, and recurring concerns surrounding the publisher’s use of microtransactions and lootboxes within its games.
One standout reply to the post came from Bioware writer Patrick Welles, which bluntly stated, “thinking about working until midnight for the better part of a year to help ship Mass Effect 2.” Another came from a former employee at the now-defunct Visceral Games, Zach Mumbach: “This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off 100 great developers because we were making a single player game.”
In other news, Halo veteran developer Paul Bertone has joined 343 Industries.