I don’t even know how long EA has been the punching bag of the game industry, but it feels like it’s been forever. Its willingness to exploit its customers with outrageous microtransactions in its sports titles is practically unrivaled, and it has a long history of making statements so tone deaf they become legendary. This community will never forget “a sense of pride and accomplishment” until the end of days, and that’s not even EA’s most famous gaff.
The company got a biblical amount of backlash on Twitter last year after tweeting “They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games”. A charitable interpretation would recognize that the tweet was trying to say a ‘10’ loses points if they only want to play games by themself instead of with you, but it turns out no one has any interest in being charitable to EA. The tweet got mocked so ruthlessly that EA later tried to backtrack by QRTing that, actually, people that only play single player games are an 11, but it was too late. It seems like the only predictable things in life are death, taxes, and EA shoving its entire foot in its mouth.
There’s context to the tweet that explains why everyone overreacted, though. As innocent a mistake as it might seem, it reopened old wounds for people that still remember when EA said single-player games are dead. I’ve heard that said so many times over the years that I had to go find the quote for myself. It came from an now-deleted interview in 2010 on MCV/DEVELOP with former EA president Frank Gibeau, who said all of its studio heads were going to start focusing exclusively on multiplayer games. "They're very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services,” Gibeau said. “As opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours – and you're out. I think that model is finished."
It’s worth noting that when Gibeau said this in 2010, EA had just released Mass Effect 2, Mirror’s Edge, The Sims 3, and Dragon Age: Origins, so it’s frankly hard to believe than even he believed what he was saying. And while the next decade certainly showed a shift towards more online games, as well as few major successes in that category like Apex Legends and the Battlefield series, it never stopped making the kind of “fire-and-forget, packaged goods only” games that Gibeau was talking about either.
Single-player games are alive and well at EA. This week’s hot new release is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which boasts an 86 critic score on Metacritic and will no doubt be one of this year’s biggest hits. It’s EA’s second massive single-player game this year after Dead Space, and we could have a third if Immortals of Aveum turns out to be any good. Single-player is all over EA’s upcoming slate too, with already-announced games like Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, Mass Effect 4, and Motive Studios’ Iron Man.
It’s been almost a year since EA said something that enraged gamers, so it’s overdue for another PR crisis. Hopefully it learned its lesson and is done taking shots at single-player games, because the quality of its games proves that EA isn’t done making them at all. Single-player games weren’t “finished” 13 years ago when Gibeau, who’s now leading FarmVille developer Zynga, made that comment, and it’s not true today either.