10 Video Games Sold On Lies
All in the name of sales.
With game releases constantly vying for our attention and money, it’s more important than ever that publishers get noticed over the rest of the crowd. It’s only by doing this that audiences will begin to take an interest in their game, and if the marketing team do their job right, the gaming community could become incredibly excited about what they see.
Whether from making grand announcements at massive gaming events, releasing eye-catching trailers, or showcasing demos with game-changing technology, developers have a handbook of methods at their disposal to get titles on the radars of potential players.
However, it’s important that audiences take these impressive looking marketing campaigns with a large grain of salt because there’s a chance that what’s being shown is too good to be true.
Publishers have developed a sneaky habit of not being completely truthful about the games they’re advertising. Sometimes this can come in the form of a misleading trailer that gave the wrong impression of what the game was, other times it can be developers telling flat-out lies about what players can expect from their game.
Whichever way developers chose to deceive players, nobody is thrilled to discover that they've been openly lied to.
10. Killzone 2 (2009) - Fake E3 Trailer
Game announcements are the developer's chance to show off their game on a massive stage to get people excited about it. Unfortunately, though, such announcements have a habit of being less than honest with audiences. One of the most infamous examples of this was the trailer for Killzone 2.
During E3 2005, developers Guerilla Games unveiled a trailer for their shooter sequel that would be released on the upcoming PlayStation 3. Made to look like actual gameplay, the footage showed a group of soldiers fighting their way through enemy forces.
It was frantically paced, action packed, and looked a little too good to be true.
...that’s because it was.
It turned out that the footage wasn’t running on the PlayStation 3 as claimed. Instead, it was a pre-rendered CGI trailer designed to look like a section of gameplay. After the lie was outed, the studio only made matters worse by doubling down on their misdirection by stating that the trailer was a “target render” for what they hoped the final game would look like.
Although Killzone 2 was positively received when it launched in 2009, its main legacy was teaching audiences to take game reveals with a huge pinch of salt.