The news of Machinima and Microsoft's shady promotion deal (covered in this previous article) has already caused some waves in the Youtube gaming review community. Seems that it's also given other content creators troubled by this courage to come forward with other such deals: EA has just been outed as allegedly offering a similar deal.
A post supposedly showing a deal to promote EA's games in a positive light for CPM bonuses has emerged on NeoGAF. The 'assignment' has a set of guidelines outlined which specify certain games to be covered which have to be played on certain platforms, that focus is not to be put upon 'major bugs' in most games (although minor bugs are allowed to be highlighted in Need for Speed Rivals) and attention should not be drawn to glitches in Battlefield 4. The list of games include titles such as the afore-mentioned Need for Speed Rivals, Battlefield 4, Madden 25 and FIFA 14.
The deal was apparently for $10 per CPM (that's a bonus $10 per thousand views), with 'view count' caps varying between games with Battlefield 4's being a massive 20 million views. With Microsoft only offering $3 per CPM and capping views of all Xbox One videos in the promotion at just under 1 million, it seems that EA's deal is the much bigger... well, deal.
But just like the Machinima/Microsoft deal it seems that no creator who signs for the deal is allowed to make the details of the arrangement public. This is a breach of the FTC guidelines in America which state that if a content creator is being sponsored for making a video promoting a product or service, they must disclose this in public.
Machinima has since claimed that their NDA only applied to the detail of the promotion, not the existence of the deal itself and in a statement to IGN, EA says that the offer was only for their Ronku program; for which they compensated fans for their EA content-containing videos and that they encouraged all creators to comply with the FTC guidelines and tell their viewers if a video was 'sponsored'.