Making gamers angry isn’t a good idea, but it is something that EA has perfected over the years.
Angering gamers is one thing, but EA took it to the next level by pissing off one of the top fighters on the planet. Khabib Nurmagomedov is an undefeated UFC fighter who even has a victory over the current champion in his weight class, but his latest opponent is EA.
When you play as Khabib in UFC 2, his victory celebration animation shows him making the sign of the cross after he wins a fight. As a devout and proud Muslim, this is not something the Russian fighter would do in real life, and he took offence to the videogame version of himself performing said gesture.
Here’s the animation in question:
The UFC is no stranger to gaffs over the past year. When they signed a deal to have Reebok making uniforms for every fighter, the clothing brand spelled many fighter’s names wrong, and made countless other typos and errors. These aren’t mistakes based on malice, but rather they’re based on a lack of attention to detail. The same can be said about EA’s error. Granted, they have several stock celebrations that all of the fighters perform, so to cross-reference that with every fighter’s religious beliefs is quite the task.
But either way, this dude fights bears. For fun. And he isn’t happy right now. So that’s a problem.
After Khabib made his grievances known, he received a personal response from EA saying they are sorry and they will be fixing this issue with an update to the game. Kudos to EA for handling this surprisingly well.
Check out EA’s response:
After reading EA’s message, Khabib ended the controversy with the following statement:
“I’m Muslim, Alhamdulilah. I have nothing against Christians. Every man in this life has his own way, and my way is Islam. Developers of the game made mistake. Let’s be honest, every human being made mistakes, and I’m not holding a grudge. They apologized and promised to fix it. Hopefully, next time they wouldn’t make mistakes like this, and take account everybody’s religion.”