6
Battlefield 1 Turned War Atrocities Into Hot Marketing
In the run-up to Remembrance Day, i.e. the day we celebrate the end of some gruesome fighting, an EA galaxy brain thought it would be totally rad to get in on the proceedings by turning the Great War into the Dankest Meme, tweeting gruesome acts as fun lulz. Like soldiers posing in front of a destroyed zeppelin with the delightful caption "When your squad is looking on point."
EA GamesOh, the utter lack of humanity.
Or a GIF of soldiers being burned alive with the caption "When you're too hot for the club" -- a meme about as old as World War 1 itself.
EA Games"When our prices get cut in half quicker than soldiers charging machine gun nests lol! #justWWIthings"
To complete the marketing massacre, these tweets were posted with "#justWWIthings," as if getting your legs blown off by a mine in No Man's Land was a lifestyle choice. Journalists picked up on the tacky hashtag and rebuked EA not only for its insensitivity, but also for picking the worst possible time to get kids in the mood to teabag their great-granddad's corpse.
EA frantically deleted all traces of the PR blunder, and said they would never again flippantly exploit the horrors of World War I to shill their wares. This was an apology they didn't offer a week before, when one of their devs tweeted to promote the game's official onesie (take that, people who think gamers are immature children) by comparing it to other essential "trench warfare" equipment, like gas masks and trenching shovels to bury your dead brothers.
5
Battleborn's CEO Used Porn To Hype His Failing Game
Randy Pitchford has a "bad rep" in the industry, in the same way a belligerent drunk has a "bad rep" with his estranged kids. Various lurid stories about his combative nature and creepy expertise in barely legal porn have come out of the woodwork over the years. But when his big-budget multiplayer shooter Battleborn was failing to rake in the cash, Pitchford decided to put his perverted penchants to work spinning the game as an underground cult phenomenon by linking to the copious amounts of Battleborn porn he (accidentally, of course) found on Reddit.