The Booth Babe Backlash - EA apologizes for dumb idea "sin to win" promo.

Like Adfreak said on Friday EA takes booth babe lechery to a new level when they announced their competition, take a photo of your self “commiting an act of lust” with a booth babe at ComicCon and twitter it under the hashtag #lust and you'll win a hot date with said booth babe (presumably). The result - pissed off people taking over that tag discussing how dumb the idea is, and a new tag invented just for EA - #EAFail. people are tweeting directly to the game creators official twitter name @Danteteam what they think about this, fun for whomever runs that account, I'm sure. Congratulations to the copywriter with the poorly chosen-words skill.

Kotaku has the full apology

We understand there's a lot of debate right now around our "Sin to Win" promotion at Comic-Con and wanted to clarify a few things. We created this promotion as part of our marketing efforts around the circle of Lust (one of the nine sins/circles of Hell). Each month we will be focusing on a new Circle of Hell. This month is Lust. Costumed reps are a tradition at Comic-Con. In the spirit of both the Circle of Lust and Comic-Con, we are encouraging attendees to Tweet photos of themselves with any of the costumed reps at Comic-Con here, find us on Facebook or via e-mail. "Commit acts of lust" is simply a tongue-in-cheek way to say take pictures with costumed reps. Also, a "Night of Lust" means only that the winner will receive a chaperoned VIP night on the town with the Dante's Inferno reps, all expenses paid, as well as other prizes.

The major obvious dumb assumption that the EA game people and Dante's Inferno are making is they are assuming that all hardcore gamers are straight males (or possibly sex crazy lesbians). This is simply not the case and when you keep doing shit like this rather than flaunt what makes your game cooler than other games, you are alienating the gay males and straight females from your buyer group. You'll never be on the forefront of expanding market with tactics like that. (Full disclosure: I'm an ex hardcore gamer. There are only so many booth babes a girl can put up with in a lifetime)

Update I'm a scatterbrain today, meant to add the link to the screengrab of EA's apology tweeted to me by @digitalartform with the nice blog Digitalartform. Thanks for that.