10 Awesome Video Games Betrayed By Terrible Marketing

Above all else, a video game’s marketing campaign should increase awareness of – and hype for – the product while conveying something valid about its story, characters, gameplay, or tone. Even if that means entertaining audiences in justifiably outlandish ways, a great advertisement will ultimately get players interested in trying out the title.

You’d think that’d be an easy ask for anyone in charge of such promotions, right? Well, tell that to the people and companies behind the examples on this list.

Rather than entice gamers with accurate depictions and friendly attitudes, these marketing blunders involved bizarre, offensive, and/or unjustified approaches that ultimately proved detrimental to the creations they represented.

That could mean several things, such as making unfair comparisons to bigger franchises, insulting entire playerbases, highlighting the wrong aspects of the journey, or flat-out lying about what people should expect from the experience.

Regardless, they clearly betrayed the video games they should’ve bolstered, and several years – if not decades – later, we’re still scratching our heads to figure out how and why things went so wrong. 

(Obviously, we’re getting into spoilers here, so proceed with caution.)

Few fans anticipated Helldivers 2 being announced during the 2023 Playstation Showcase. After all, the 2015 original was critically and commercially successful, but it didn’t set the world on fire, and with nearly a decade passing since it came out, hope for a follow-up had essentially faded away.

Yet, the AA sequel quickly became one of 2024’s most actively played and talked about releases. With its superb shooting mechanics, engaging multiplayer camaraderie, and inventive mission structures, it’s little wonder why it garnered such strong word-of-mouth hype.

Unfortunately, that’s virtually all the hype it received because Sony Interactive Entertainment focused instead on showcasing two other shooters arriving around the same time (Foamstars and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League). They even made Foamstars available for free to PS Plus members at launch, thereby diverting a ton of attention away from Helldivers 2.

Plus, the presentations Sony did put out were relatively safe and underseen, positioning the game as blander than it is and ensuring that casual gamers probably weren’t even aware Helldivers 2 existed.

Ironically, and to the surprise of almost no one, both Foamstars and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were basically dead on arrival.