When a company decides to have fun on its social media, it tends to take more tame approaches to a joke or meme. When Electronic Arts took a shot at a trend, it stirred up more than it could imagine. The attempt at the "They're a 10 but..." tweet caused derision not only among fans but among its employees as well. There have been few brand tweet misses as spectacular as the Electronic Arts attempt at the latest social media trend and reports state that the fallout of the tweet has made waves internally at the company.

The EA tweet took a jab at gamers who play single-player games and sparked ire online as fans and developers working on games for EA took offense to the notion that single-player games are a downgrade. USA Today and Kotaku reported that developers and executives of EA's single-player games were outraged at the tweet. The feeling is that it minimized their contributions to the company and perceived as second-tier compared to their microtransaction-filled multiplayer games like FIFA, Apex Legends, Madden, The Sims, and others. Screenshots from one of EA's Slack channels obtained by USA Today showed employee displeasure at the tweet within hours of it going up.

RELATED: Guardians of the Galaxy Narrative Director Joins BioWare

Even as Twitter quickly moved on, there have been roundtable meetings within Electronic Arts involving executives and other personnel from the single-player games that were angry that the tweet went out, seemingly without thought of its other studios or EA's history with single-player games. EA made an attempt to own up to the tweet, and it was internally discussed that social media managers of the single-player studios would get their shots at making fun of the tweet. That plan quickly fell apart as the social media managers opted out.

It was revealed through the meetings with executives from the insulted studios that the people that ran the big EA Twitter account were not games industry people inherently or were very new to the industry and may have been unaware of EA's past comments. Nor did they communicate with the other social media managers for brands under the EA banner. So when this tweet went out, all the other studios were caught off guard and unsurprisingly had no interest in participating in the damage control tweets afterward.

EA has fantastic single-player experiences like Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order under its banner which was nominated for numerous awards, and the sequel Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is currently in development. The tweet undermined the efforts of developers at BioWare, Respawn, and others that are working to make single-player games and diversify EA's games outside its yearly sports and racing titles and the troubled Battlefield franchise.

This is a moment that will go down in social media history of corporate tweeting gone wrong. Companies have seen brands like Arby's and Wendy's nail having a personality on social media and want a chance to show off a fun side. But that was done with years of building that online persona. A tweet like that at random from Electronic Arts, with its history of talking down on single-player games only caused the company to become the social media "Villain of the Day" and induced unnecessary distractions for its developers working there.

MORE: What The EA Single-Player Game Tweet Was Likely Supposed to Mean

Source: USA Today