I opened Facebook yesterday--I know, I should deactivate it, but I need it for Marketplace stuff--and the very first thing I was confronted with at the top of my feed was this:
I should know better than to read anything in my feed, but this stopped me dead in my tracks, because it's an extremely shitty post.
To break it down: EA's shares did indeed decline last week, and the under-performing (by EA's own expectations) Dragon Age: The Veilguard would have played its part, but the drop-off was mostly because of a huge slide in sales for EA Sports FC 25, an ageing football series EA's entire financial security rests on and whose woes--and fans’ exhaustion with them--I've written about previously.
Game Rant's actual news story about this, on its website, makes this clear. And the lead image for that story on Gamerant.com is EA's logo. Yet on this Facebook post promoting that same story Dragon Age is mentioned before EAFC, Dragon Age is used as the background of the image, and front and centre is a picture of a Dragon Age character. What gives?
Game Rant are far from the only games site to overemphasise Dragon Age's role in EA's financials, partly because few games writers understand financials, but mostly because the majority of readers of specialist video game websites don't care about sports games. But specifically centring Taash, a nonbinary character from a game that has received disproportionate blowback for its casting decisions, in a post specifically tailored just for Facebook, a platform that has jettisoned all attempts at civil discourse and abandoned itself wholly to the very worst people on the internet, sure is a look.
I reached out to Game Rant's EiC for comment on the discrepancy between the story and its Facebook post, but have not heard back. Whether the packaging was intentional or not, though, it's serving the same purpose regardless: catering to, and riling up, the chuds.
Posts like this are a handy reminder that, as we see major outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post already beginning to cower before the spectre of authoritarian rule, and pivot to assholes as desperately as so many outlets once tried to pivot to video, they won't be the only masthead to do so.
The last thing any of us needs right now are video game websites doing the same.
