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EA stages publicity stunt.
Rath444
Member Posts: 35
So did anyone notice EA made the news by pulling a massive publicity stunt? Apparently a crowd of religious protestors outside the E3 Video game convention in LA were picketing with signs condeming the game companies new release, Dante's Infernal. Waving signs that it was anti-christian.
Thew whole thing was staged by EA games.
Comments
Have a media link or news clip vid?
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
Link?
Please check out my channel. I do gaming reviews, gaming related reviews & lets plays. Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/user/BettyofDewm/videos
kotaku.com/5289471/eas-fake-protest-riles-some-religious
Here ya go. Sorry I forgot to paste.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3174647
I should also clarify, the game in question is not an MMO. (perhaps this post can be moved to a more appropriate place?) Still interesting news about an online game company that our community may find interesting.
so.
We saw these guys. They all did look a bit suspiciously young and their signs were overly clever.
What really gave them away was the perfectly stenciled EA logos. Protesters scrawl EA on a sign, they don't trace something.
When we saw them, we just snapped a photo and wandered on. Didn't think much of it, staged or otherwise. There is a pic in our E3 gallery, I believe.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Pretty clever. I actually stumbled across this on digg.com which had a couple of images and I didn't realize it was staged until just now. It made me lookup the game and try and figure out why they would be protesting. If it wasn't EA I would give them props.
It just goes to show you that some viral marketing choices sound better on paper than they are in reality.
~Webby "This MMO needs more dead bird."
How much is EA paying you to virally market their viral marketing?
Pretending you represent someone else and making a public statement on their behalf is pretty cheezy. I'm sure EA was dropping hints that it was they, with the logo's and all. And I'm sure they would have publicly admitted it was them if people didn't figure it out so quickly. And I'm sure that was all part of the plan, after all the news networks covered it for cheap publicity. But now we'll never know for sure.
As a gamer, I'm not impressed. As a Catholic I'm not either. Overall, it's just vaguely curious, much like EA these days.
Once upon a time....
Considering they tried to buyout rockstar games, a company that gets legitimate protests, and they make up their own protest, it is kind of sad.
How much is EA paying you to virally market their viral marketing?
How much is EA paying you to bump his viral marketing thread about viral marketing?
Probably the same they paid me: nothing.
All forums need a "don't bump thread" checkbox next to the Post Message button. Being forced to bump a thread each time you post causes a lot of terrible ideas to get a lot more visibility than they deserve.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Ihmotepp
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Originally posted by Rath444
So did anyone notice EA made the news by pulling a massive publicity stunt? Apparently a crowd of religious protestors outside the E3 Video game convention in LA were picketing with signs condeming the game companies new release, Dante's Infernal. Waving signs that it was anti-christian.
Thew whole thing was staged by EA games.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How much is EA paying you to virally market their viral marketing?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How much is EA paying you to bump his viral marketing thread about viral marketing?
Probably the same they paid me: nothing.
All forums need a "don't bump thread" checkbox next to the Post Message button. Being forced to bump a thread each time you post causes a lot of terrible ideas to get a lot more visibility than they deserve.
I'm actually trying to broker a deal now. It's largely dependent on this thread getting bumped.
Send me 5% of your deal, BUMP!
Well EA gets what they deserve. Yes, they are responsible for putting out a batch of excellent games every now and then, and without them countless games would be left without any support but they are the biggest group of pricks to inhabit the gaming world. This may sound strange, but I'm not surprised they did this. I'm not siding with the evangelists or whatever they are either. Religious groups are right below EA on my shit list, and right above PETA. I hoped they get slapped with a lawsuit and have to pay for court fines. They're not that smart if they can't even make fake protesters.
How much is EA paying you to virally market their viral marketing?
How much is EA paying you to bump his viral marketing thread about viral marketing?
Probably the same they paid me: nothing.
All forums need a "don't bump thread" checkbox next to the Post Message button. Being forced to bump a thread each time you post causes a lot of terrible ideas to get a lot more visibility than they deserve.
Call Ari Gold. You need a better agent.
I could not agree with the phoney protestors more. Any company to do such a thing in deceiving their own customers through a long serious, history, and record of violating trust, abusing employees, destroying titles, bullying competitors, and so forth should, as the sign says, be called the "anti-christ" of gaming. I think the anti-innovator of gaming is more the correct term.
The model must be opposed and, hopefully, die:
This marketing gimmick is not amusing considering the very real opposition to everything EA.
How much is EA paying you to virally market their viral marketing?
Lol.
Sir, next time you think this thought, I hope you think about the many Christian efforts to ease pain and suffering around the world.
Take, for example, the Catholic Relief Services. Linked ( charityreports.bbb.org/public/report.aspx ) is the report from the Better Business Bureau, where you can see that the last reported year ending Sept., 2005, they raised over $700 million, spent over $530 million in their programs, while spending only 3% for costs of raising funds and administrative expenses.
Emergency 185,244,000
Agriculture 104,514,000
HIV/AIDS 83,252,000
Education 51,318,000
Health 48,709,000
Welfare 24,932,000
Peace and justice 22,443,000
Small enterprise 13,423,000
Total Program Expenses: $533,835,000
And that's in just 1 year.
I'm pretty sure EA doesn't do anything like that.
Their CEO/President (Kenneth F. Hackett) was paid $283,520 that year, for running such a massive effort efficiently.
Compare that to the compensation packages of CEO's in business. Such as EA's John Riccitiello, who according to Forbes (people.forbes.com/profile/john-s-riccitiello/28819) has a total compensation package worth $6,365,823.00 in 2009.
That's more than 20 times what the CEO of such a massive humanitarian effort as the Catholic Relief Services earned.
So, please, next time you think of religious groups, try to bump them up the ladder a bit, eh?
Once upon a time....
Umm... what?
I'm sorry but I don't quite get what you are saying. EA did make a fake group of protesters, thats what the topic is about. They had a group of people act like christian fanatics protesting their new game "Dante's Inferno". The whole thing was just a bit of viral marketing. I for one laughed and thought it was funny. I've dealt with those types of christians who enforce even the tiniest part of their beliefs on anyone. I knew someone who was freaking out and yelling that we were sinners because we weren't baptised before Y2K happened. They curse and scream when certain artists play. And they'll only play the worst of the Christian music only in their cars. And you know what? If I didn't catch the fact that the EA logo was done right on all the signs, I wouldn't of been surprised if I saw them in that group.
As for EA. They have done a big 180. They picked up Brutal Legend, even though it was a huge creative risk, are facing off against Activision-blizzard because Activision is getting pissy since the game looks like its going to do great now after they dumped it. The recent Madden game was actually a revolution of Football games, instead of just a tired reiteration with an updated team roster. Not to mention Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Left 4 Dead, and several other games. They are really turning around. Activision on the other hand, is the ones starting to milk every bit they can out of any and all franchises. Hello Guitar hero? There's a few others, but I can't think of them right now (though I wouldn't be surprised if they were responsible for some of the current WoW-based things like the horrid gamefuel commercial....).
And really... PETA is above them? PETA just bitched at Obama for swatting a fly during an interview, tried getting a bunch of WoWers to "protect seals" (which turned out about as well as the funeral held a few years back on a PvP server, go ahead and youtube it, its awesome).
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-politics/20090617/US.Obama.Dead.Fly/ = the fly thing.
Oh, and in case anyone didn't know, EA did say that the protest was just a joke campaign to promote a game after a few days, they didn't try hiding it.
Would have been funny if a cop showed up and asked for there permit, and hauled them all off to jail when they did not have one.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Waiting for several days before you admit to something is a rather odd definition of ‘they didn't try hiding it’.
What’s more interesting is that a company acknowledges that any news about its product is good news. They don’t care if you demonstrate, talk them down on forums etc. As long as you keep them in the public eye it’s fine.