The Escapist Bulletin: Dante’s Inferno and EA’s crazed marketing plan

Erik Estavillo is a determined man. First he sued Sony for infringing on his first amendment rights after the company banned him PSN, and then he sued Microsoft and Nintendo - the former for the pain and suffering he felt after his Xbox 360 got the dreaded red ring of death, and the latter because a system update on the Wii meant that his homebrew channel no longer worked.

Suing three large multi-national corporations would ordinarily be sufficient for even the most litigious of people, but Estavillo is a cut above the rest and is now suing Activision Blizzard because World of Warcraft isn’t fun enough and alienates gamers from one another.

To make it even more bizarre he’s calling Winona Ryder and Martin Lee Gore of Depeche Mode as witnesses because he believes that they understand alienation.

Your mind is probably boggling at this point at the sheer brazenness of Estavillo, and that’s to be expected: it’s difficult to fathom exactly what makes a person think that they deserve a truck full of money - Estavillo is seeking a million dollars in punitive damages - for some tiny, or in this case imagined, slight.

But Andy Chalk of the Escapist news team raises an interesting point: what if it’s a marketing ploy for EA’s Dante’s Inferno?

It sounds crazy - although whether it’s more or less crazy than Estavillo actually thinking he has a case is a tough call to make - but EA has already pulled some pretty crazy stunts to advertise the game.

Some have been harmless and actually quite entertaining -like when it Rick-Rolled the Escapist's very own Yahtzee with a musical box that had to be smashed to bits before it would shut up - but others, like the ill-conceived Sin to Win promotion, or the fake Christian protest group at E3, seem designed to offend.

Those who have played Dante’s Inferno seem to consistently compare it to God of War, and usually in a quite complimentary fashion, so it seems baffling that EA would risk so much bad publicity to publicise a game that should be able to stand on its own merits.

As important as marketing might be, EA runs the risk of alienating people by trying much too hard.

This is assuming of, course, that EA actually cares if it goes too far. It’s already shown that it has no problem making light of people’s religious beliefs to promote the game, both with the aforementioned fake protest and the fake religious game Mass: We Pray, and it has showed that it didn’t have a particular problem with treating women like objects in its Sin to Win promotion.

Admittedly, EA apologised for the wording on that promotion, but only because half the internet complained about it.

Whether Estavillo is on the EA payroll or not, the company is walking a very fine line between being edgy and going over the edge and beyond what is appropriate or acceptable when advertising a third person action-adventure game.

It’s interesting to see EA experiment with viral marketing, but it’s a little disconcerting that it seems to be going out of its way to anger as many people as possible.

It seems unlikely that EA would actually go to the extent of filing actual lawsuits just for the sake of a publicity stunt, but it’s difficult to completely discount it considering what EA has done already.

It would certainly be a gutsy move, and would ensure that Dante’s Inferno lived on in infamy, but that wouldn't help were the company to be indicted for filing frivolous lawsuits.