EA makes a bad joke, gets relentlessly flamed

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Yesterday, Electronic Arts, the unmitigated king of unforced errors, made a woefully ill-advised twit.

They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games

— Electronic Arts (@EA) June 30, 2022

The convention of a popular meme is that a person is described as being highly attractive, then listed something about them that makes them unattractive.

The quality that makes someone unattractive is the fact that they prefer single-player games. There is supposed to be a message here. The kind of people who only play games that offer deep, introspective meditation on the human condition are the kind of people who degrade the people who enjoy them.

The joke is true.

It is real rich to have an electronic device.

This is a joke made by the arts.

The developers who worked on some of the single-player games are not amused.

My company: unable to muster up the courage to say the overturning of Roe v. Wade is pretty horrific.



Also my company: with multiple teams making Single Player games https://t.co/PYtRLTBEqS

— Blair Brown (@BlairBroon) July 1, 2022

This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off ~100 great developers because we were making a single player game https://t.co/2SXhQtRGE8

— Zach Mumbach (@zachulon) June 30, 2022

One of the largest video game publishers is called Electronic Arts. The decisions it makes have consequences. There are better uses of time than punching down the one thing it has to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing. The company that makes jokes about how unattractive your work is can be a bad thing. It has to feel worse in the case of Respawn and BioWare, who are currently working on sequel and follow-ups to some of the best single-player work.

The subsequent beating it took up and down social media may have been due to the joke being in bad taste.

I think the gaming community would be better off if we stopped sex with other people.