10 Insane Marketing Stunts That Were Used To Sell Video Games
6. Your Mom Hates Dead Space 2 (Dead Space 2)
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.