EA Apologises for World War One Twitter Campaign

Battlefield Tweets
The offending tweets, captured by @nielsen_holly

Games publisher EA has apologised for tweets posted promoting its World War One-set game Battlefield 1.

A shooting game set during WWI was always going to be a difficult product to sell in a sensitive way, especially with the releases proximity to Remembrance Day, but a Twitter campaign for the game managed to be especially tone-deaf.

Posted by the games official account, the tweets featured images from Battlefield 1 – such as a flamethrower being used to burn soldiers to death – with meme-ready captions, in this case “When youre too hot for the club”. It was an attempt to push the hashtag #justWWIthings – a campaign that began back in July with a post which showed a crashing zeppelin, an image reminiscent of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, captioned “basking in the glow of a burning airship”.

The tweets were highlighted by games journalist and history Holly Nielsen on Twitter, who posted: “Responsibility for sensitive engagement was theirs as soon as its setting was chosen. And this is the marketing they think acceptable?”

EA has since deleted the tweets, and posted an apology posted on the Battlefield account, which reads: “We apologize for any offense taken to content posted earlier. It was not at all our intent to show any lack of respect to the WW1 era.”