10 Dumbest Ways You’ve Been Sold Video Games

Video games are quite a young medium, yet over the past few decades, the industry has seen a multitude of different ad campaigns, pre-order incentives and promotional tours that have tried to figure out the best way to make new releases seem as appealing as possible to a paying audience.

Unfortunately, for those of us actually buying the games, a lot of this trial and error has resulted in some absolutely ridiculous stunts, all performed in the name of selling you the biggest new titles.

Especially in today's current pre-order and hype culture, we're seeing increasingly desperate attempts from companies to get customers to pony up the cash for a new game based on dodgy promises and cringeworthy promos alone.

However, while most of these ideas amount to nothing more than inoffensive little stunts that can be easily shrugged off, in the past few years alone, players have witnessed some of the most baffling, godawful ways that publishers and retailers have tried to sell us a product.

To be fair, no matter how horrible these ideas may have been, they're never totally malicious.

It's just that, well, video game companies think their customers are stupid. But we aren't as dumb as these money-men think we are (for the most part), and unfortunately for them, their idiotic, WTF ideas have rightly received the scorn and mockery they justly deserve.

Although the Watch Dogs bomb scare was a bit of gaff on Ubisoft's part, you could at least see how they intended to promote their game in a way that was (mostly) inoffensive... kinda... to everyone involved.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for a similar incident that occurred during the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Because, for some reason, Ubisoft decided that it would be a great idea for a random guy covered in bandages to start brandishing a fake gun around a bar in New Zealand. Pointing the prop weapon at people who were probably otherwise enjoying a nice night drowning their sorrows, the police were promptly called and thankfully the whole thing ended without someone accidentally being shot in the confusion.

The guy admitted that the whole thing had been a marketing gimmick for the upcoming Splinter Cell game - yet over six years on from the incident, it's still not clear what the best case scenario for this misguided stunt would have been.