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Fulgrim

Aliens: Colonial Marines Draws False Advertising Lawsuit

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/05/01/aliens-colonial-marines-draws-false-advertising-lawsuit/


"A suit was filed yesterday in the Northern District of California Court by law firm Edelson LLC for their plaintiff Damion Perrine. The premise behind the complaint isn’t just that the game is bad, rather it’s that it was falsely advertised to the public, who were mislead about the quality they could expect from the game."



lol

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I wish I had thought of this sooner, or I would have cashed in on it a while ago.

I've always been highly discerned from buying a game when their trailer shows no gameplay footage whatsoever. Just a cinematic short movie of a dude shooting other dudes and doing a bunch of acrobatic maneuvers. I'm not enticed to even consider buying a game unless I see at least a good 5 or 10 minutes of the game actually being played.

Youtube has been helpful with that, as long as the players keep their mouth shut during recording.

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Elder Scrolls games tend to get trailers like that. It offends me greatly.

A:CM was terrible. I thought it was worse than DNF. I hope these guys win just because I think Gearbox deserves a kick in the teeth, and I don't like marketing, or marketers, in general.

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Aliotroph? said:

Elder Scrolls games tend to get trailers like that.

That and Final Fantasy games. Though you are buying those to essentially play a shitty interactive anime.

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Some friends get really mad at me when I accuse (modern) Final Fantasy games of being unworthy of the term "game." Leads to fun drunken arguments. Those are the friends who can't understand sandbox games because the lack of direction is apparently overwhelming.

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I don't know your friends, but there's no golden path to earning the title of "game" and none of us are gatekeepers. Rock Paper Scissors is a game. Frisbee is a game. LEGO building is a game.

That being said...
Just by virtue of being winnable, Final Fantasy is more of a game than any pure example of the sandbox genre.

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False advertising. You were promised an Aliens game. That's what you got. How is that false advertising? Just because they show the demo?

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Bucket said:

I don't know your friends, but there's no golden path to earning the title of "game" and none of us are gatekeepers. Rock Paper Scissors is a game. Frisbee is a game. LEGO building is a game.

That being said...
Just by virtue of being winnable, Final Fantasy is more of a game than any pure example of the sandbox genre.


Those other things count more as games because the point of playing them is the gameplay. The point of a game like Final Fantasy X is to see the ridiculously long, crude cinematic sequences.

Many of its biggest fans will tell you they play the game for its story. They're enduring the "game" parts so they can see animation that often looks worse than even a low-budget anime. It's just silliness.

I don't like JRPGs in general (too directed != RPG in my mind), but I give the less cinematic ones a pass for focusing on the game, rather than the bad movie with button pushing. Technician seems to have the same idea.

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Doubt it will go through, but it was extremely bad game, I returned it as it was just too painful.

It may do the games industry some good to think that they can be sued for making such rubbish games and they should actually in fact put some design effort into their games. If this cant be managed properly, a new manager should be appointed.

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geo said:

False advertising. You were promised an Aliens game. That's what you got. How is that false advertising? Just because they show the demo?

Yeah, as abhorrently terrible as Aliens CM was, I doubt whether this will be successful. It was the same game as originally promised, just a much, much shittier version of it. It would be extremely difficult to prove it's not the same game in a court of law, as there's so many subjective factors involved here.

I think the most sensible and productive thing people can do is forget all about it and pretend it doesn't exist.

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Aliotroph? said:

Those other things count more as games because the point of playing them is the gameplay. The point of a game like Final Fantasy X is to see the ridiculously long, crude cinematic sequences.

Many of its biggest fans will tell you they play the game for its story. They're enduring the "game" parts so they can see animation that often looks worse than even a low-budget anime. It's just silliness.

I don't like JRPGs in general (too directed != RPG in my mind), but I give the less cinematic ones a pass for focusing on the game, rather than the bad movie with button pushing. Technician seems to have the same idea.

You're trying to make an objective assertion based on subjective preference. You're also hand-waving FF by reducing the experience to "Press X to see cutscenes", ignoring the gameplay at large, particularly the combat engine each game has (some are pretty deep). Name your favorite game and I'll reduce it to a single sentence to make it sound stupid and pointless. The whole exercise is moot.

Even so, there are characteristics a "game" can have.
- An end goal / requisite for victory
- An opponent or problem to be solved
- A system of rules describing legal and illegal actions
- The application of a winning strategy
- A point or progress counter

A cinematic RPG has plenty more "game" elements than your average open-ended sandbox game.

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40oz said:

I've always been highly discerned from buying a game when their trailer shows no gameplay footage whatsoever. Just a cinematic short movie of a dude shooting other dudes and doing a bunch of acrobatic maneuvers.


But it worked for Final Fantasy VII and VIII... (apparently, the Gamer's manifesto isn't worth the bytes it was stored at).

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geo said:

False advertising. You were promised an Aliens game. That's what you got. How is that false advertising? Just because they show the demo?

On that principle, they could have released the original "Alien trilogy" game and said that "you got an Aliens game, where's the problem?"

Before A:CM's release, there were a number of publicly available videos apparently showing gameplay and game content. However, when the game was released, these exact same sections of the game were of a significantly lower visual quality than what potential customers had been shown prior to the game's release. To me, that sounds like reasonable grounds to at least try and claim false advertising.



Mind you, various fast food outlets have been doing the same thing for years with their idealised pictures of the food they sell.

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Enjay said:

significantly lower visual quality than what potential customers had been shown prior to the game's release

We see the difference. But in their ignorance, non-gaming people could just shrug their shoulders and say they don't see any difference, or even claim that the final release looks better with a perfectly straight face.

I just don't think it would wash. And as you point out, burger photography is an obvious affront to trades description laws (perhaps the greatest of all), but they've got away with it for decades.

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I see a simple change in the game engine - the first being geared toward post-processing and scripting to allow for a better demo trailer. You can ogle the demo graphics all you like but understand that the game is not playable in that form. The guys from that video don't understand game technology and they're piggybacking some niggling graphics complaints onto a game that's already notorious for other problems.

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40oz said:

I wish I had thought of this sooner, or I would have cashed in on it a while ago.

I've always been highly discerned from buying a game when their trailer shows no gameplay footage whatsoever. Just a cinematic short movie of a dude shooting other dudes and doing a bunch of acrobatic maneuvers. I'm not enticed to even consider buying a game unless I see at least a good 5 or 10 minutes of the game actually being played.

Youtube has been helpful with that, as long as the players keep their mouth shut during recording.


The law suit isn't based off a trailer. There are several instances where Gearbox did a so called "live demo" that Randy Pitchford did commentary on. The footage of course turned out to be prerenderd.



All the footage from about 1:30 on is prerendered being passed on as actual game-play. 90% of it does not even happen in the final product. Randy Pitchford also continue to lie after the game came out and had the balls to talk about how he hated being called a liar after people called him one.
http://gengame.net/2013/02/gearboxs-randy-pitchford-says-he-wasnt-lying-about-aliens-colonial-marines/

I'm all for the class action and hope the plaintiff wins. We need to start holding gaming studios and companies in general when they pull stunts like this.

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Look, it's one thing to put out a shitty game. It's even one thing to make all sorts of promises that the game doesn't keep. However, I think it's fair to say this lawsuit is valid. We were shown video of "actual gameplay footage" that turns out to have not been real gameplay footage at all. We ALL know trailers lie. That's not the point. When we're shown footage of what is supposed to be an actual gameplay demo, and it turns out to not even remotely resemble the final product, that's a serious issue.

To put this in perspective, and to once again bring up the fast food comparison, we all know that fast food looks better in advertisements than it does in real life. This is akin to a trailer for a game looking better than the game itself. With Colonial Marines, however, we got something more akin to ordering a Baconator from Wendy's and finding that, despite all the advertisements, despite all the marketing, despite the pictures prominently displaying bacon, it doesn't actually have any bacon in it. You'd have every right to complain. You were promised bacon, you bought the sandwich on the pretense of it including bacon, and yet there's no bacon to be found. Sure, even if the bacon tasted crappy, you wouldn't really have a case, but if there's no bacon in the first place, then you have a goddamn right to be pissed off.

I don't know what the actual chances of the lawsuit going through are, given how many people don't really know all that much about the game industry, but I do believe the case itself is valid.

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geekmarine said:

When we're shown footage of what is supposed to be an actual gameplay demo, and it turns out to not even remotely resemble the final product, that's a serious issue.

This is an exaggeration.

Again, we can see the difference, and it's a big deal to us. But realistically, it's basically the same game as what was shown in the demo. Hyperbole like "it doesn't remotely resemble what was promised" is just as misleading as the visuals in the ACM demo, depending on your perspective.

Don't get me wrong, I was just as bummed as anyone else. I thought the game was a total mess and shouldn't have been released. But objectively speaking I don't think we (the gaming community) have a case at all. Good luck to those who think differently, though.

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geo said:

False advertising. You were promised an Aliens game. That's what you got. How is that false advertising? Just because they show the demo?


see this

or are you always this thick?

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DoomUK said:

Again, we can see the difference, and it's a big deal to us. But realistically, it's basically the same game as what was shown in the demo. Hyperbole like "it doesn't remotely resemble what was promised" is just as misleading as the visuals in the ACM demo, depending on your perspective.


Doesn't matter. They advertised a product that doesn't exist in the form that's being advertised. If that's not 'false advertising' I don't know what is. They cheated, plain and simple.

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Thanks Freeze. I just like giving people a counter point to discuss so we're not all 'yes clearly they duped us all into pre ordering the game 6 years in the making like Duke Nukem Forever when we should have waited. It could have looked awesome like the commercials, but still been shit.'

Another thing is proof of fault. Who's fault was that trailer? Sega's? The marketing company's? Gearbox's? It probably rests on Sega since they're a publisher. But then Sega might have a lawsuit or a contingency where shit rolls down on Gearbox since Sega didn't make the game and Gearbox is responsible for giving the materials that were used for the trailer. Kind of like well someone was murdered... we have 3 suspects, who did it?

Since Randy Pitchford is agreeing with the lawsuit... well it might have merit.

Also does this concern Internet trailers or just TV trailers?

Maybe you didn't read the old ACM topic, but I'm well aware of everything. :-)

Come to think of it.... This isn't an advertisement, but Gearbox is full of tricks >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSvTqfmv3DE

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Graf Zahl said:

Doesn't matter. They advertised a product that doesn't exist in the form that's being advertised. If that's not 'false advertising' I don't know what is. They cheated, plain and simple.



This trailer contained plenty of stuff which wasn't in the actual game. As with A:CM, it was certainly disappointing when I discovered all the cool little things that were missing from Doom 3 when it hit the stores.

False advertising? Probably. Technically. But as the changes were similarly cosmetic and/or negligible, it would have been tough to make a legal case out of it.

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the catch there would be.... is that a preview or advertising material? Sure you can consider them to go hand in hand, but its not actually advertising something like pre order Doom 3 now!!!

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geo said:

its not actually advertising something like pre order Doom 3 now!!!

Neither was the A:CM demo.

Both demos/trailers were created to stir up a bunch of hype about an upcoming title, which were shown off at E3 - a huge annual event where such promotional videos get a lot of attention. Neither urged the potential customer to "pre-order now!" directly.

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So is this a class action lawsuit? Has everyone that bought ACM received a card in the mail telling them you have 4 months to get on board with us so you can get your money back or a percentage of what the settlement is?

I wouldn't know since I only rented the game and beat it for $6. I'm so happy with that :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

Also can I go to McDonalds and get a shitty hamburger that doesn't look like the one in their ads and get them for false advertising? Like the people at Dominos?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag

^^^ we make shitty pizza and we know it! I've had the 'new pizza' at a few different parties over the past 3 years. Salt is the new ingredient.

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Assuming those have browsed the Gearbox forums, a lengthy thread can be found here. Lots of different opinions, including my own thrown in early.

Honestly, Gearbox has reaped what they sown for putting ACM on the backburner for the 6-7 years they had the IP in their hands.

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I'm excited to see what will happen to the games industry if companies are forced to show nothing but the WIP game in trailers and demos, and only that which will be in the final product. "Here's part of a level with nothing in it. Here's a four-second scripted sequence with no gameplay. Here are some unfinished models. Here is a paragraph of story."

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