10. Aliens: Colonial Marines' E3 Trailer Vs. Retail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z2qVebxlUo After the botch-job that was Aliens vs Predator, the gaming public shouldn't have let their expectations get the better of them in the build-up to Colonial Marines. But people can be forgiven for getting over-excited when the E3 trailer for the game looked so damn good. Big mistake. When reality struck and the game came out, it looked vastly inferior to the trailer, with far less detail and worse lighting effects. Even
the characters' voices sounded disinterested and lazy in the final game compared to the demo, as if aware that they were featuring in an inferior product that just wasn't worth putting any vocal effort into. Colonial Marines was so badly received, that gamers filed a class-action lawsuit against Sega and developer Gearbox for falsely advertising the game. The suit is ongoing, but Gearbox has now been dropped from it. On top of that, Sega filed a lawsuit against Gearbox, accusing them of funnelling money away from Colonial Marines into Borderlands 2. The whole debacle has massively dented the public's trust in publishers. Since this time, gamers have been extremely sceptical towards pre-launch trailers, ever-vigilant that they could be watching another Colonial Marines-style illusion.