A decade ago, Electronic Arts (EA) won the dubious honor of being America’s most hated company — twice. While she has retracted the rating because she doesn’t seem too far from casual controversy or regular criticism of her practices.
This week the company tried to get into a meme which is basically: “They’re 10, but [insert something bad]To do this in spite of their official EA Twitter The account sent: “They are 10 but they just love to play singles games.”
The tweet elicited immediate reactions not only from the public in general, but a lot of the major players in the gaming industry including some of its employees – and none of the many thousands of responses seemed kind.
This post impressed many, including Zach Mumbach who was previously a producer at “Dead Space” developer Visceral Games (the studio was closed by EA in 2017). said in tweet:
“This is the company that shut down my studio and laid off about 100 great developers because we were making a single player game. Also, if you break the game ratings down into a 10-point scale, most EA games are 6 or 7. Not because the developers are bad but Because EA is forcing them to speed up games. EA’s leadership won’t know what a “10” looks like in terms of video games.”
Others like Vince Zampella, president of Respawn Entertainment who makes both multiplayer (“Apex Legends”) and single-player (“Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order”) hits on EA, replied To Tweet with a suitable palm face emoji.
as such Kotaku He notes that the company’s growth has been “primarily driven by doubling down on multiplayer live service games… and finding new ways to monetize them through microtransaction stores, season tickets, and loot chests.”
EA famously scrapped the ambitious single-player Star Wars game from the author of the original “Uncharted” trilogy, Amy Hennig, only to release “Star Wars: Battlefront II” with pay-to-win loot chests. This title became a concern of the microtransactions controversy and drew legislative scrutiny.
As some have pointed out, the tweet is particularly baffling given that some of EA’s most popular titles to date have been by single player including BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. “Dead Space”, “Crysis” and “SSX” privileges; and the likes of “Mirror’s Edge”, “Titanfall 2”, “The Sims 4” and most recently “Fallen Order” mentioned above.
Additionally, some of their recent multiplayer efforts, including “Anthem”, “Battlefield V” and “Battlefield 2042” have drawn heavy criticism and some of the worst user results ever seen on aggregate sites like Metacritic. After the rage, EA chirp: “Well deservedly grilled. We’ll take that L because playing solo games actually makes them 11″
source: computer games