14 DAY TRIAL // Three television viewers in the UK have complained about adverts depicting scenes from Activision titles Call of Duty 2 and CoD2: Big Red One. They have declared these ads "misleading". In their defense, Activision officials have stated that using pre-rendered footage was "common practice".
In this case, the ASA (UK's Advertising Standards Authority) received three complaints - two concerning Call of Duty 2 (PC, Xbox 360) and one concerning Big Red One (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), which argued that the graphics used in the adverts were superior to that of the game itself, and that viewers were being misled about the true quality of these titles.
The ads did not include any indication that the images shown did not reflect the quality of graphics in these games. While the scenes shown on TV communicated the war themes, they were not accurate representations of the graphics in the games themselves. Therefore, these ads have been banned from being broadcast.
This situation is likely to raise concerns for other publishers who use rendered footage to publicize computer games - in print as well as on TV.