10 Ways Video Games Keep Lying To You

Ever since E3 blew up to be the extravagant and, more importantly, expensive spectacle it's become, game developers and publishers have been, to put it nicely, finding creative ways to hype up their games.

After all, games today are incredibly expensive to make, averaging a cost of about 80 million dollars. Time and space at E3 isn't cheap, not to mention the many other video game conventions that have popped up over the years.

When you combine booth space, press conferences, employee wages, special game demos and trailers, paying celebrities and models, construction - the list goes on and on, and can easily reach hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And publishers want to see that money back.

Unfortunately, building hype is the best way to do that. And the easiest way to build hype is to wow people. Developers are under a ton of pressure from publishers to hype their games, which often aren't ready to even be seen.

So we get trailers intended for internal use pushed out as marketing, or narrow, curated gameplay demos made exclusively for the show, or games running on significantly higher hardware specs than they will in the real world.

So whether it's blatant false advertising, little white lies, or seemingly harmless enthusiasm pushed too far, these are the lies the industry just can't stop telling.

During Xbox's recent Summer 2022 showcase, the developers of the "all-new", brand-rebooted Forza Motorsport touted a whopping 48 times improvement in the fidelity of their physics simulation.

Just let that sink in for a second. That's their previous physics fidelity - whatever that means - multiplied by 48! It's such a brazenly outrageous claim that it's hilarious. How is it even possible to measure something like that as one number? And what is that number? Not only does this sound ridiculous, but we also have no idea what it even means.

Of course, this is nothing new.

Some of us are old enough to remember Peter Molyneux - the king of hyperbole - claiming that the original Fable would be a full, evolving simulation. One famous claim was that you could plant an acorn and watch it grow into a tree over the course of the game - a ridiculous statement for an original Xbox game.

And we have to mention the grandfather of all marketing hyperbole: "John Romero's going to make you his b*tch." Whatever that was supposed to mean.

He did not. Not even close.