EA Comes Under Fire for Shady PR Stunts

EA has come under heavy fire lately for some deliberately shady PR techniques. You can't argue with the result, however, that has pretty much everyone (including us) talking about it. The question is: will extensive discussion, and the resulting widespread anger that seems to accompany it, actually help their game sales? Stunts have ranged from their "win a date with a booth babe" contest to paying game site editors a faux "bribe" to fit with their sin motif. "Outraged Christian bloggers, complaining female and LGBT gamers, editors being sent checks made out directly to them — all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage. The campaign has been childish, daring, and borderline tasteless. Writing checks directly to game writers is cheaper than advertising on a site, with a much better result."

Comments

The Christians are just pissed because...

[popo]

The Christians are just pissed that their "moral" outrage seems to so consistently coincide with extremely popular titles.

So much so, in fact that marketing firms are now going so far as to stage 'faux Christian outrage' in the hopes that the outrage itself is the thing that contributes to the hits. This of course must be very annoying for the Christians who were hoping that the world was actually listening to what they were saying. It turns out that marketing departments haven't really been listening to the Christians at all, but instead -- happily noting the simultaneous occurance of increased revenues with the angry mobs of yammering Christians.

Which is as it should be of course. Trying to ram one's morality down the throats of others is generally regarded as poor form.

Re:I don't get whats so shady about it.

[Darkness404]

They paid writers to write about it? Isn't that like... their job?

They pretty much bribed writers to write favorable reviews. Thats why people started flocking to the internet rather than print for all their gaming reviews because just about all the paper magazines were written to have a favorable bias on some truly terrible games. No one wants to be ripped off when they buy a game, and some publications were even owned by the company that made games (such as Nintendo Power) that even went as far as to put in propaganda through the years of the evils of GameSharks and Game Genies, the evils of old ROMs and why you should always make sure that all of your games had a Seal of "Quality" on them.

Stupid People, Untie!

[TiggertheMad]

The real question is why are all these people getting bent out of shape over the 'commit acts of lust' contest?

Yeah, you are gay, bi, or just some sort of feminist who is offended by anything with a penis. Whatever. The contest is just asking for you to take a picture of yourself with a booth babe. That's it. Take a freaking picture.

Now, last time I checked, a lot of people take pictures of booth babes. in general, its a pretty acceptable practice (except in England, where cameras are only used by terrorists...) that has been going on for years. Now, you can complain that there isn't equal representation of 'booth beefcakes' (or whatever else you might want), but that really has nothing to do with EA's contest, does it? You might be a transgendered feminist lesbian hemaphrodite, all you have to do is stand next to a booth babe and have your picture taken. IS THAT REALLY SO AWFUL?

Pretty much anyone complaining about this PR campaign are idiots in my book.