One of the trends that gained the most traction in the past couple of weeks comes from TikTok, where content creators started the "They're a 10, but" challenge, where they rank someone with the highest score, but then proceed to list a trait that potentially dunks or raises the rating. This trend quickly spread to other social media, and Twitter became one of the most popular platforms to check out for funny takes -- and also terrible ones. This is a way to make fun of imaginary partners for possible red flags about their toxic traits, with one popular example being "She's a 10, but she claps when the plane lands."
Of course, the trend extended to the video game industry as well, and several publishers and game developers jumped into the meme by sharing all sorts of takes on fictional characters, franchises, and more. EA decided to try out the meme by sharing a tweet that reads "They're a 10, but they only like playing single-player games." However, EA was met with backlash for the tweet almost immediately.
The tweet was criticized by members of the video game industry and several content creators for multiple reasons, chief among them the fact that EA itself published and created several single-player games that did better than the company's multiplayer titles. One of the retweets comes from Blair Brown, Senior Producer at Respawn who is working on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, EA's upcoming entry in the Star Wars saga that is also going to be a single-player experience.
Another response came from Patrick Weekes, a writer at EA BioWare who has written for both the Dragon Age series and Mass Effect games, eventually becoming Lead Writer on the former. Weekes' tweet is a memory of them working hard on Mass Effect 2 for the better part of an entire year to help ship it in time. The Mass Effect series was a single-player experience up until the release of Mass Effect 3, which had a multiplayer game mode.
Fellow video game publisher Annapurna Interactive also chimed in on the topic and suggested that EA should have left the tweet in the drafts, with thousands of likes signaling how the community shares the sentiment. The comment stings even more because Annapurna Interactive is known as a publisher mainly for its single-player titles, several of which enjoyed a lot of success.
Overall, EA's tweet about single-player games shows that trends are not always something one should follow. Other Twitter users pointed out how ridiculous it is to claim that multiplayer games are better mere hours after the launch of the new The Sims 4 trailer for the High School Years expansion, seeing how successful this single-player franchise has been and still is.