mrpayroll

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=14891

Tom Bramwell 11:46 22/02/2006

Publisher argues that its was a "common practice"

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints from three television viewers that adverts depicting scenes from Activision title Call of Duty 2 and its current generation console counterpart CoD2: Big Red One were misleading, and declared that they must not be shown again in their present forms.

The adjudication, published today, is likely to send shockwaves through the industry as it focuses on the question of whether pre-rendered footage is an acceptable representation of a computer game - in its defence, Activision didn't argue that it was, but rather that using pre-rendered footage was "common practice".

In this case, the ASA received three complaints - two concerning Call of Duty 2 (PC, Xbox 360) and one concerning Big Red One (PS2, Xbox, Cube), both of which argued that the graphics used in the advert were superior to that of the game itself, and that viewers were being misled on those grounds.

The ASA's investigation revealed that the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) understood the adverts to be made of scenes taken from the games themselves, although apparently no checks were made because it wasn't until afterward, when contacting Activision about the complaints, that it was informed by the publisher that the computer-generated scenes had been produced solely for the ads. "They said they therefore immediately made the ads unacceptable for broadcast as they did not consider that this was common practice in such ads."

"The ASA noted that the ads did not include any indication that the images shown did not reflect the quality of graphics of the games. While the scenes used communicated the themes of the game, they were not accurate representations of the graphics in the games themselves. We considered that this was misleading.

"The ads breached CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1 (Misleading advertising) and 5.2.2 (Implications). They must not be shown again in their present forms," the adjudication concluded.

Activision, for its part, argued that using pre-rendered footage was "common practice" and that "they had not been told that it was not acceptable to use material created specially for an ad in this way" and had acted "in good faith".

With that defence regarded as insufficient by the ASA, the adjudication is likely to raise concerns for other publishers who uniformly use rendered footage to publicise computer games - in print as well as during television adverts - at the prospect of similar complaints being dealt with in much the same way.

Activision UK could not comment on the ASA adjudication at the time of publication.



Good!

Chris

Groucho

Wow, if this law was in place two generations ago, the Playstation never would have overcome the N64.

Draven

No kidding.

I hate pre-rendered cutscenes posing as gameplay as much as the next gamer, but I never get confused if trailers and ads don't use actual gameplay footage. It's pretty easy to tell (I mean really, if you can't see your gun, the map, ammo, life, etc. it's probably a cut scene).

And Activision is right - it's a common practice.

PixyJunket

Truth.. well, heh, maybe not.. but still funny.

fujishig

Wait, weren't these prerendered scenes actually in the game itself? How is that any different from a trailer taking the best parts of a movie and making it seem worth watching?

Can't wait for the lawsuit against Nintendo. "In your commercial, you showed a real life guy in a Bowser suit getting pelted by baseballs. Nowhere in the game is the player able to do that. Also, that freaky Animal Crossing commercial did not accurately represent the true gameplay in the game... nowhere are there skateboarding animal kids."

Michael Corvin

the computer-generated scenes had been produced solely for the ads

Draven

I don't watch many commercials, but now that I think about it, I've seen the "Big Red One" ad I think they are referring to - and I also remember thinking "that's not from the game, it looks too good."

Josh H

False advertising plain and simple when the footage isn't even cutscenes from the game.

I'd love to see game adds required to actually show in game footage. Would cut down on some of the fanboy hyping when new adds, screen shots and videos come out.

fujishig

Hmm... I admit, I just read the bolded part and skimmed over the rest. In that case, yeah, they were wrong, and it most certainly is not common practice.

joshd2012

Actually, the PS1 was sold and marketed to game developers as supporting FMV. Interesting that they stopped this practice with the next generation, even though companies were still creating them.

PixyJunket

That's because they no longer need to use pre-rendered FMV to create dynamic cut-scenes in games. That was one (of many) of the biggest things I hated about that era and am ever so glad it's been subsidized this time around.

Y2K Falcon

I agree with this decision.

Now, where are all my hot 20-something chicks, Coors Light.

Anubis2005X

I'm definitely happy about this. I played Call of Duty 2 all the way through on the PC and absolutely loved it. Then when the 360 came out they started showing those ads and I was like "holy crap!!!" thinking they souped up the game for the 360 version. Good to know I didn't miss anything... I think it's important to put this into play considering how similar real time and pre-rendered graphics have become...

sracer

wah wah wah. This has been going on from the first days of videogaming.


How many people actually thought that the game would look like it was depicted on the cover?!

Michael Corvin

Nice. Almost as good as this one:

fujishig

The real megaman was so much better than the boxart indicated. I almost didn't pick up the game because of the art...

Similar to that infamous Fabio cover on Iron Sword:Wizards and Warriors 2.

Draven

OH MY GOD! I just went looking for the Fabio cover for this very thread, but lost interest after one broken link.

EDIT: Oh, here we go:

UAIOE

Weren't there older games system (2600 era) where on some games they would simply use screenshots from the same game but used on a better system?

I seem to recall hearing about at least one instance of this.

I fail to see how a commercial is worse than using misleading pictures on the actual game box.

So these "Call of Duty" ads, are they the ones of the GI's talking and then getting hit with artillery...and then the one where the tank gets hit with a bazooka then the guy grabs the german trying to get in the tank?

SuprVgeta

Yeah I remember watching these commercials and thinking to myself whoa this game looks really good... has to be a pre-rendered cut scene. I hate commercials that just use CGI video and do not show any actual gameplay. Midnight Club (I think) does this too, however I think that CGI is actually used in the game.

Jeremy517

I don't believe that anyone would have been that stupid...

Even if they were tricked into buying it, at least they were tricked into buying the best game on the Atari 2600

sracer

I don't believe that anyone would've been that stupid in buying PS2 and XBox games either, but there we have it.

fujishig

I think people can figure out that static art is not indicative of in-game play. But a CGI-rendered scene that looks like it may be an in-game scene is something else entirely.

I was watching some videogame show where they were interviewing the studio that makes a log of the CGI scenes for games (for instance, they made the ones for X-men Legends 2). When asked about the PS3 "trailer" for Killzone, they mentioned that they were offered the gig (to make a CGI cutscene) but turned it down, which is why he suspected it was not actual in-game footage like Sony claimed, even though the CGI was rendered to look like it was (First Person viewpoint, etc.). I think the Call of Duty commercial is similar in that someone could look at it and think that those were in-game graphics, especially if they had no idea what the 360 was capable of outputting. IIRC, the commercial was from first person view, right?

Supermallet

That's awesome.

Outlaw

Yeah this ad always irritated me. They have been doing it for awhile with their games, so by "common practice" they must have been referring to it being common with themselves. I can tell it is pre-rendered, however I can't tell you how many times I've been at Best Buy hearing people rave about this game based off the commercial, "did you see the commercial on TV, the graphics are awesome!" As hard to believe as it may sound, there are a lot of people who truly believe that what they see on TV is the actual game experience, despite it being contrived.

tor_greg

Well a lot of average people sincerely don't know what the plausible limits of certain hardware it. To them, it's like magic.