Remember when Medal of Honor: Warfighter developer Danger Close Games said it would avoid cashing in on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, because it "wasn't their story to tell?" Well, they're still not telling that story, thankfully. However, EA has found an alternate way to cash in on the hunt for the world's most notorious terrorist in the only way EA really knows how: through a marketing deal with a license holder.
Today, EA announced a partnership with Sony Pictures to release a downloadable map pack for Warfighter based on the upcoming film Zero Dark Thirty. The movie, which is directed by The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow, is based on the years-long manhunt for Bin Laden across various parts of the Middle East. This DLC pack will include two locations in Pakistan: the notorious Darra gun market, and the northern Chitral region, where Bin Laden purportedly hid out for an extended period.
In order to perhaps make this whole thing seem a bit less disgusting, EA will be donating $1 from each map pack download to its Project Honor campaign, an initiative the publisher founded to donate to various military charities. A minimum of $1 million will be donated out of the profits from the map pack.
While that's all well and good, there is literally no way to do anything related to Bin Laden at this point that doesn't look like a cheap publicity grab. The fact that this multiplayer pack is such a tangential relation to the hunt for Bin Laden altogether makes the association with Bigelow's film even weirder. It's not as if EA is licensing plot and/or characters from the movie. They're literally slapping a brand on a map pack and invoking the specter of Bin Laden for the sake of "authenticity."
Sorry EA, but when it comes to authentic Bin Laden hunting, your game was beaten years ago.
153 Comments