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EA releases statement on sexual abuse in the gaming industry

Brandon McIntyre
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Electronic Arts released a statement on its website about sexual misconduct and harassment allegations within the gaming industry.

“In recent days we’ve seen and heard a number of disturbing stories around sexual harassment, abuse, and misconduct in our industry,” started EA’s statement. “We want to be very clear on our position: These behaviors are never OK — not in our communities or any others. Electronic Arts supports everyone that has come forward to report abuse, and we are asking anyone who has experienced any kind of harassment or sexual misconduct in our community to come forward.”

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EA added that it will investigate every sexual abuse claim, “ensuring there is safe space for people to come forward and taking the right actions on behalf of our community. The stories we’ve heard recently make it clear there is still a lot of work to be done in our industry.”

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EA provided details on how employees and gamers can report sexual abuse and harassment in-game and online.

“Being part of a gaming community, whether you’re an employee, creator, player, or anyone else, should be a positive, fun, fair, inclusive, and most importantly safe experience,” EA said in the statement. “This is a part of our commitment to Positive Play and we intend to continue to act on it.”

An EA spokesperson provided a link to the previously posted statement when Digital Trends reached out for additional comment.

Beyond its internal efforts, EA’s public statement could provide a guideline for other companies, especially after the gaming industry contends with new allegations.

EA’s announcement comes the week following a series of sexual assault allegations involving Twitch. The streaming service since released a statement on how it also intends to address sexual abuse claims, with multiple female streamers voicing their opinions on the state of sexual misconduct in the gaming industry and Twitch’s response.

Ubisoft also experienced multiple internal sexual harassment allegations last week, with several Ubisoft employees put on leave, according to Bloomberg.

The magnitude of sexual harassment in the industry is unclear as information and allegations continue coming out. However, EA’s actions, especially regarding its workplace guidelines, and the fact that they were made widely available, could set a new standard considering its size and influence in gaming.

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Brandon McIntyre
Brandon McIntyre
FIFA 23 career mode: the best teams to manage
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FIFA 23 is the latest in EA Sports’ popular soccer franchise, and one of its best features is career mode. This lets you choose any club in the game -- or even create your own -- and lead them to glory, picking teams, making transfers, and doing things your way.

But which club should you manage? With over 700 teams to choose from, it can feel overwhelming. Fear not -- we’ve analyzed every club in the game to find five that will create careers as thrilling as they are unusual. Whether you want to start from the bottom or rely heavily on youth, these are the best teams to manage in FIFA 23.

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With EA’s help, Wild Hearts solves Monster Hunter’s biggest problem
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Although Capcom’s Monster Hunter series is more popular than ever in the West, it’s still a daunting series to get into because of its overbearing tutorials and complicated UI. Koei Tecmo development team Omega Force didn’t want to repeat this mistake with Wild Hearts -- its upcoming fantasy monster-hunting game with a complex offensive crafting element. To solve this issue, it partnered with Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label to better understand how western players prefer to be treated in the earliest stages of a complicated adventure.
“We wanted to understand better how this game might be received by players in different parts of the world,” Co-Director Takuto Edagawa said when discussing the fruits of the EA partnership. “Players around the world don’t tend to like information being over-presented. They don’t want you to explain too much; they want to learn more in a hands-on way by experiencing it themselves through play.”
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Digital Trends put this to the test with our playable three-hour build of the earliest parts of Wild Hearts and found its introduction and tutorials to be better than anything Monster Hunter has done. Within 30 minutes, Wild Hearts players should be familiar with the basic concepts the game deals with and be set for what’s shaping up to be an enjoyable cooperative hunting and crafting adventure.
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“One thing that was very important to us was to not do a lot of explaining and then get into the story and gameplay,” Edagawa tells Digital Trends. “We wanted you to be able to play as soon as possible. We know that our players want to experience the game and world as soon as they can, so that was the fundamental approach we took with the opening.”
Wild Hearts begins peacefully, with a lone hunter walking through a forest rife with small friendly Kemono creatures. Soon, a small-time hunt begins as the player spots a deer-like Kemono. During this hunt, players will learn the basics of the camera and movement controls, the attacks at their disposal during combat, how to climb ledges with limited stamina, and how to sneak up on an enemy.
These are some basic fundamentals in hunting games, but the difference compared to Monster Hunter Rise is that the game isn’t constantly stopping the player with long cutscenes or large text boxes to explain basic things. Text boxes only appear if players choose to activate them when a tutorial pops up.
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The best game openings get right into things, which Wild Hearts successfully does. According to EA Originals Executive Producer Lewis Harvey, this is the aspect of the game Koei Tecmo wanted to work closely with EA on, although EA provided some character and world design input to the Japanese development team at Omega Force as well.
“EA has a great wealth of experience in its user research division, and we were able to provide a huge amount of testing and data to Koei Tecmo that really helped them fine-tune the game and make critical decisions around their feature set,” Harvey said. “A lot of the creative input and feedback we have given has been around tutorialization, onboarding, and clarity of features and UI to players.”
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Before I could do that, though, the environment around us quickly changed and was overtaken by ice. I used the skills the game had effectively taught me by that point to hunt down the source, a giant ice wolf Kemono, and I engaged them in battle. Unfortunately, this fight was impossible to win, so my character was defeated and tossed into a deep cave. That’s when Mujina reappeared and activated my Karakuri, a little device my hunter found in the last hunt and carried with them.
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Karakuri building skills are critically important when preparing for hunting large Kemono, too. After escaping the cave, I used the Karakuri more traditionally to build a camp near a girl I found unconscious on the ground. Once I did that, another giant Kemono that looked like a giant rat with plants growing out of it attacked, and I set off on the first real hunt of the game, concluding the opening and kicking off the true Wild Hearts adventure.
While a lot more pleased me afterward -- like the colorful world design, attack damage numbers, and fact that Karakuri remains in the world map after a hunt to remind you of previous exploits -- this opening is what stuck with me.
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After the announcement in 2020 that the EA Origin marketplace would be shutting down, EA has released its next PC platform: the EA app.

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