10 Insane Marketing Stunts That Were Used To Sell Video Games

6. Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2 (Dead Space 2)

Dead Space 2
EA

It's rare that a company will advertise their game by labelling it "an atrocity", but that's exactly what EA did with 2011's Dead Space 2.

Shortly before the game's late-January launch, the company unveiled their "Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2" campaign, including a video that consisted of several different mothers - who were not paid actors, but actual, genuine mothers - reacting to some of the game's goriest, most violent sequences. Needless to say, these women were not impressed with what they saw, with one of them questioning "why would they even make something like this?"

A brilliant play by EA, this stunt leveraged the game's "disgust factor" and gave it a positive spin: this game is so gross, so horrific and so bloody, that you have to experience it for yourself.

They did cheat a little by only having middle-aged women participate in the reaction (of course they were going to react this way), but this was still a funny, novel way to market a video game. Plus, the main video has almost a million hits on YouTube, so it clearly had a wide reach.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!