Bad press, blacklists, and crow: EA’s bad hair day?
Son of a gun, Electronic Arts has three feet! First foot in mouth: the Gears of War‘s “zero innovation.” shenanigan. Second foot in mouth: all the Final Fantasy dissing. And now, the third: some overzealous employee at one of EA’s European offices sent a blacklist email to Spanish gaming blog Merodeando for its critical articles on FIFA 07.
EA originally invited Merodeando, via “the publishers Vidaextra” (probably Merodeando’s parent publishers, but we’re still struggling through the Spanish text), to attend a press conference unveiling of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars on the December 1. On November 29, however, Merodeando received an email from EA which simply said that (based on a more readable translation by a Kotaku reader):
- They found Merodeando articles which criticized FIFA 07,
- They would prefer to work with gaming websites which “treat them (EA) better”, and thus
- Merodeando’s invite to the C&C3 presscon has been cancelled.
Well, there’s the bad press and blacklist, but where’s the crow? The episode doesn’t end there. There’s an update to Merodeando’s post, which says that later on an EA rep contacted them to apologize for that godforsaken email, and that the blog peeps will meet up with EA to discuss the matter, or as they put it, “how we can construct with them a normal relation just as we have with other many manufacturers.” There’s the crow, down the gullet…
Aside from the usual critical EA comments in Kotaku – of which they’ve been getting a lot of lately – one theory that has arisen from this is that some PR guy in one of EA’s Continental offices decided to take his loyalty to his company a little too seriously, and launched a Quixotic tilt at Merodeando. Once someone higher up (maybe even at HQ in the USA) found out, said PR guy got slapped down for literally tilting at windmills; hence, the apology.
You know, we’ve been critical of EA, too, especially over the microtransactions thing, but hey, if EA is man enough to apologize to an indie blog in the Iberian, who knows? That’s at least one foot they can get out of their mouths.
Son of a gun, Electronic Arts has three feet! First foot in mouth: the Gears of War‘s “zero innovation.” shenanigan. Second foot in mouth: all the Final Fantasy dissing. And now, the third: some overzealous employee at one of EA’s European offices sent a blacklist email to Spanish gaming blog Merodeando for its critical articles on FIFA 07.
EA originally invited Merodeando, via “the publishers Vidaextra” (probably Merodeando’s parent publishers, but we’re still struggling through the Spanish text), to attend a press conference unveiling of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars on the December 1. On November 29, however, Merodeando received an email from EA which simply said that (based on a more readable translation by a Kotaku reader):
- They found Merodeando articles which criticized FIFA 07,
- They would prefer to work with gaming websites which “treat them (EA) better”, and thus
- Merodeando’s invite to the C&C3 presscon has been cancelled.
Well, there’s the bad press and blacklist, but where’s the crow? The episode doesn’t end there. There’s an update to Merodeando’s post, which says that later on an EA rep contacted them to apologize for that godforsaken email, and that the blog peeps will meet up with EA to discuss the matter, or as they put it, “how we can construct with them a normal relation just as we have with other many manufacturers.” There’s the crow, down the gullet…
Aside from the usual critical EA comments in Kotaku – of which they’ve been getting a lot of lately – one theory that has arisen from this is that some PR guy in one of EA’s Continental offices decided to take his loyalty to his company a little too seriously, and launched a Quixotic tilt at Merodeando. Once someone higher up (maybe even at HQ in the USA) found out, said PR guy got slapped down for literally tilting at windmills; hence, the apology.
You know, we’ve been critical of EA, too, especially over the microtransactions thing, but hey, if EA is man enough to apologize to an indie blog in the Iberian, who knows? That’s at least one foot they can get out of their mouths.