Remember last week? It happened about 34 years ago, so if you haven’t, I understand. But last Thursday, The official EA Twitter account tweeted a bad joke about single player games Resulting in an Internet-wide roasting and ultimately an apology from battlefield publisher. And apparently, EA is still dealing with angry employees who felt the tweet was an insult to them, their employees, and the games they make.
New report from USA Today It sheds some light on how the terrible tweet turned out, the reactions to it internally at EA, the plans in place to deal with the situation, and the ongoing consequences of it all. The whole mess is both confusing and funny.
According to the report, an hour after the tweet was posted last week, it landed in EA’s internal Slack chat room, where employees and social media staff started sharing all the angry reactions (Some of the current EA executives) that appeared everywhere. When the negative feedback got out of hand and the rhetoric started, the folks at EA started crafting a plan to turn the tweet into a positive. It wasn’t good.
The initial plan was to get all of EA’s other social media accounts to start digging into the tweet with the hope of drawing more attention to Various individual games Publisher in business. But some employees noted that “EA’s roasting strategy” would only reinforce the online narrative that EA’s private studios and teams hate the company. And so, after several social media managers withdrew from that plan, it collapsed.
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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 Frank Gibbow, then-President of EA Games, saying that single-player games are “over.”)
Furthermore, this source says that the staff running the Twitter account are “completely new” and that most of them are “not really people in the gaming industry” and likely have no idea about EA’s long, poor history with single-player games.
It seems strange that the official Twitter account of one of the world’s largest video game publishers is not run by people with working knowledge of video games and the industry, but then again, when do major companies make logical decisions?
