EA's Tweet About Single-Player Games Infuriates Entire Industry (original) (raw)

Published Jul 1, 2022, 11:21 AM EDT

Andrea is an editor at GameRant, where she has been writing professionally about video games for nearly five years. She became a gamer for life at 8, thanks to a copy of Pokemon Red and her Game Boy. Her passion for games was combined with work when she came across GameRant in 2021, so she started her career in video game writing.
Andrea loves games where she's tasked with thinking strategically. She has an obscene amount of hours in Path of Exile (almost 8,000 on Steam), over 2,000 hours in Destiny 2, probably around 10,000 hours in Pokemon games, which she always completes the Pokedex of and tries to fill the shiny Pokedex too, 100% completion in multiple RPGs of various kinds, like Borderlands 2 and 3, Oblivion (and Oblivion Remastered), she plays MMOs religiously (especially World of Warcraft), and she has a vast experience in playing and building decks for Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon TCG Pocket, and Disney Lorcana.
Andrea has extensive professional experience as a translator and ghostwriter. She has a BA in Psychology from 2015, a Master's Degree in Communication & Translation from 2016, and a Master's Degree in Copywriting & Advertising from 2019.
One of Andrea's favorite articles for GameRant is about Pokemon Violet probably outselling Pokemon Scarlet, which is what happened. One of the articles she's most proud of is about The Last of Us 2's Ellie and the game's perpetual cycle of revenge.

One of the trends that gained the most traction in the past couple of weeks comes from TikTok, where content creators started the "They're a 10, but" challenge, where they rank someone with the highest score, but then proceed to list a trait that potentially dunks or raises the rating. This trend quickly spread to other social media, and Twitter became one of the most popular platforms to check out for funny takes -- and also terrible ones. This is a way to make fun of imaginary partners for possible red flags about their toxic traits, with one popular example being "She's a 10, but she claps when the plane lands."

Of course, the trend extended to the video game industry as well, and several publishers and game developers jumped into the meme by sharing all sorts of takes on fictional characters, franchises, and more. EA decided to try out the meme by sharing a tweet that reads "They're a 10, but they only like playing single-player games." However, EA was met with backlash for the tweet almost immediately.

The tweet was criticized by members of the video game industry and several content creators for multiple reasons, chief among them the fact that EA itself published and created several single-player games that did better than the company's multiplayer titles. One of the retweets comes from Blair Brown, Senior Producer at Respawn who is working on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, EA's upcoming entry in the Star Wars saga that is also going to be a single-player experience.

Another response came from Patrick Weekes, a writer at EA BioWare who has written for both the Dragon Age series and Mass Effect games, eventually becoming Lead Writer on the former. Weekes' tweet is a memory of them working hard on Mass Effect 2 for the better part of an entire year to help ship it in time. The Mass Effect series was a single-player experience up until the release of Mass Effect 3, which had a multiplayer game mode.

Fellow video game publisher Annapurna Interactive also chimed in on the topic and suggested that EA should have left the tweet in the drafts, with thousands of likes signaling how the community shares the sentiment. The comment stings even more because Annapurna Interactive is known as a publisher mainly for its single-player titles, several of which enjoyed a lot of success.

Overall, EA's tweet about single-player games shows that trends are not always something one should follow. Other Twitter users pointed out how ridiculous it is to claim that multiplayer games are better mere hours after the launch of the new The Sims 4 trailer for the High School Years expansion, seeing how successful this single-player franchise has been and still is.

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