When my two year old speaks does he speak for my entire family? Or if a solider yells something across enemy lines in the heat of battle, is he speaking for the entire army? According to Forbes author Erik Kain the simple answer is yes. On Wednesday he quoted a tweet by a Battlefield Product Manager with a post entitled "EA Product Manager Says 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2' Looks Tired, Should 'Take A Year Off'" naming Kevin O'Leary.
He then suggests that while he agrees with the content of Kevin's tweet about Call Of Duty's new game (note I independently agree 100%), he's not sure if it's right or not. Then he goes on to quote a completely different article at length. "Just shut up EA. I’m sick of you running your mouth, and this is coming from someone who actually enjoyed Battlefield 3 more than Modern Warfare 3," Forbes quotes.
This is embarrassing. The fact that Erik makes such a massive deal out of a half sentence tweet like this means he has no real understanding of EA or the gaming industry's internal command chain. Product Manager is below Senior Product Manager, which is under Director, which is under VP, which is under Senior VP, which is under a whole host of other people, which is under the GM, which is under five more people on the executive team. The fact that Forbes and Kain blow up a story about one guy in the trenches at EA when he has a one line take on the new COD trailer is just ridiculous. This is where everything gets really meta.
Should we apply the same logic to Forbes? Just because Erik Kain gives a bad take should we automatically assume that all of Forbes staff and publications are also problematic? No of course not. Kevin O'Leary speaks for EA about as much as I speak for EA. OK maybe a bit more, but neither Forbes or the author ever reached out to O'Leary or EA for comment to clarify and implying these things is reckless.
But on the flip side Forbes got 5k page views and Kevin got 100 new followers, so let the quality stories keep on rolling!
