Electronic Arts' ILLEGAL Marketing Campaign

EA Games. Tell it everything. Many things come to mind when we think of Electronic Arts. For some, it's how they dominated the casual gaming market with games like FIFA, Need for Speed, The Sims, and Madden. For others, they're a constant reminder of horrible business practices, resulting in being voted the worst company in America two years in a row and sullying the reputations of countless legendary franchises. However, something you may not know about EA is that in 2009, they took some time away from publishing games and began moonlighting as arms dealers. Yes. You heard that right. In April 2009, while marketing their game, The Godfather two, Electronic Arts sent brass knuckles, which in many states are classified as deadly weapons that are illegal to possess, to a number of games journalists including Kotaku, Philadelphia Inquirer, and many, many more. How could one of the biggest, most noteworthy, and powerful game publishers in history think shipping illegal weapons to countless companies would be a good idea? And what were the effects of their short lived double lives as accidental arms dealers? That's what we're talking about today. The Godfather two is an action adventure game released for PC, Xbox three sixty, and PS three in 2009. And much like the first game in the series, is a tie in to the media franchise of the same name. The games are regarded as Grand Theft Auto clones, not unlike many third person shooters from around the same time, and see the player exploring a sandbox world, finding a variety of weapons, stealing cars, gunning down whoever you want, whenever you want, and are able to do the main narrative missions at their own pace. It was a gameplay loop that would be successful with a number of other franchises of the era, like The Getaway, the True Crime series, Saints Row, Driver three, and other existing media franchise tie ins like The Simpsons Hit and Run and Scarface The World is Yours. This was a recipe for success that was experiencing hit after hit after Grand Theft Auto essentially created an entirely new market and served a largely casual audience, which is exactly the audience EA had spent decades cornering. So it was no surprise when EA released the first God Father game, and it became a commercial success, selling just under 2,000,000 copies. While the success of the first game was promising in terms of a sequel, they wouldn't be able to skirt by on just 2,000,000 sales for their next outing. 2,000,000 copies is great on the PS two when fans were still hungry for this kind of game and budgets could remain reasonable. But the seventh generation of consoles, those being the PS three and Xbox three sixty, caused serious change within the gaming industry. Better graphics meant bigger teams. Bigger teams meant bigger budgets. And when developing for the PS three, which was notoriously difficult to develop for due to the unique structure of …