EA sticks foot in mouth mocking single player gamers, gets roasted by industry

It’s an open secret that Electronic Arts would rather you not play single player games. Well, now the company is getting thoroughly roasted by gamers and the industry after saying the quiet part loud.

Posting on Twitter on Friday, the EA’s social media account said “They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games.” While it’s a pretty lame joke, developers too strong exception to it given the company’s habit of closing down popular single player studios.

In response to the Tweer, Zach Mumbach, a former producer at shuttered EA studio Visceral Games, said that “this is the company that shut down my studio and laid off ~100 great developers because we were making a single player game.”

“If you break game rating scores down to a 10 point scale most @ea games are a solid 6 or 7. Not because the developers are bad but because ea the corporation forces them to rush games out. EA corporate leadership wouldn’t know what a “10” looks like in terms of video games,” Mumbach elaborated.

Vince Zampella, head of Respawn, the studio behind EA’s only hit Star Wars game, Jedi: Fallen Order, which is a single player game, only posted a facepalm emoji in response.

For their part, EA’s social media team did admit their defeat. “Roast well deserved. We’ll take this L cause playing single player games actually makes them an 11.” However, as mentioned, EA has a long track record of shuttering single player studios. Company execs have been also been eagerly predicting the death of single player games for over a decade now. They’ve claimed that these games are less profitable that multiplayer titles. Probably because microtransactions and loot boxes are a tougher sell in non-competitive narrative driven titles. Though the rhetoric does predate it.

Personally, we’ll take God of War developer Cory Barlog’s stance on this. “Single-player games forever.”