8 Amazing Video Games With TERRIBLE Marketing

Making a great video game is nothing short of a minor miracle, but sadly "just" making a banger isn't enough to ensure success - a game also needs to be marketed well to ensure it actually reaches the right people and sells enough to turn a profit.

And the history of gaming is unfortunately littered with brilliant games that were totally undermined by their marketing, perhaps to the extent that they ended up flopping in sales. 

And if they didn't flop despite this, it was basically incredibly lucky.

Terrible marketing can of course come in many forms - perhaps the publisher tries something edgy that just falls totally flat, or the trailers simply fail to emphasise the game's best elements for whatever reason.

And then there's the absence of marketing, where a game basically gets sent out to die with a minimal marketing spend because the publisher clearly doesn't believe in it.

It's always maddening to see a great game fail to get the positive attention it deserves because of garbage marketing, where a terrific piece of entertainment is inexplicably made unpalatable to the masses...

Let's kick this list off with a doozy. 

It's no exaggeration to say that the brilliance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is basically inversely proportional to its utter dogwater marketing. Square Enix's incompetence with selling this game is so staggering it should probably be studied in universities the world over.

For starters, Mankind Divided swiftly received flak for using the phrase "mechanical apartheid" in its marketing to describe augmented humans being segregated from the rest of humanity, feeling that it trivialised the real-world system of racial segregation.

That was just the beginning, though - promotional concept art used the slogan "Aug Lives Latter", seemingly inspired by the real-life Black Lives Matter movement. Again, many found this tasteless and tone deaf.

And then there's the entire pre-order debacle, where Square Enix introduced a convoluted five-tier pre-order system and encouraged players to "augment" their pre-orders, with big spenders in the top tier being able to play the game four days early.

The backlash was so severe from journalists and players alike that the tiered pre-order scheme was ultimately scrapped, with all perks instead being made available to everyone who pre-ordered.

Yet despite how thoughtlessly the game was marketed, Mankind Divided is a mostly terrific follow-up to Human Revolution. 

However it ended up underperforming commercially, and the avalanche of controversies could certainly have played a part in that.