Why Game Marketing is Finally Coming Back Down to Earth: Captured on PS5

An in-depth commentary on how modern gaming showcases, consumer expectations, and marketing transparency reveal the changing face of the industry.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there's a lot of good reasons why the makers of an upcoming game may want to reassure you that their product works on a good piece of hardware you probably have rather than showing it at its best on a better piece of hardware that you statistically probably don't.

Obviously, it's all about the lowest common denominator. No disrespect to the PS5 Pro, but significantly more people own a standard PS5 and are unlikely to bother upgrading until PS6 shows up because the economy is in the toilet. And with the best will in the world, a few extra blades of grass in Horizon Forbidden West is scarcely worth the upgrade to most people.

Despite that, it does seem to fly in the face of common wisdom to not showcase games in their best possible state. I mean, Microsoft aren't making Xbox trailers on the Series S, are they? Granted, they're not making anything at the moment apart from people redundant, but if you wanted the most pristine, the most detailed, the most impressive PlayStation footage available, you'd capture from a PS5 Pro.

Clearly, there are other more nuanced concerns at play. One of the maddest examples is the recent Unreal Engine showcase featuring The Witcher 4, which was purportedly running on a standard PS5 and at 60fps despite featuring a suite of advanced next-gen lighting and visual effects. Seems far too good to be true, but our friends at Digital Foundry did a big deep dive interview on this and—well, this is that demo running on PS5.

“60 fps on a base console is totally achievable with all the features that we have.”

This is a major departure for CD Projekt Red, who've always tended to showcase their new games running in-vision on PC. And although they've gone on to clarify that running a vertical slice like this isn't the same as doing it with an entire game, it's still impressive and pretty reassuring for those of us still rocking the older hardware that we might be able to play future games for years to come without going bankrupt.

Remember when gameplay trailers were captured on absolute nonsense-spec NASA-grade PCs that no mortals could actually afford? On the old VG247 YouTube channel, we still get regular comments on the infamous Watch Dogs E3 2012 gameplay demo that turned out rather infamously to be a 10-minute bullshot. The game didn’t look like this. Certainly not on the hair dryers people were playing games on back in 2012.

The sheer gulf in visual fidelity between this vertical slice and what people actually ended up playing rightly annoyed a lot of people, and I think it represented the start of a massive shift in what consumers were willing to put up with from games marketing.

Ubisoft would go on to take a lot of flack for the state of Assassin’s Creed Unity just a couple of years later—a game which promised the true arrival of next-gen but could barely run on the platforms it was designed for. Okay, barely run is a bit of an exaggeration. It suffered from a few frame drops and the odd bug, but it was fine. I enjoyed it, and so did millions of others.

What I'm doing here is coping to the fact that the media's propensity for sensationalism has a big part to play in stoking these fires too—and we are aware of it. But unfortunately, we're trying to please the whims of unknowable algorithms as much as we're trying to serve your needs as consumers, which leads to people like me saying things like “Assassin's Creed Unity could barely run on PS4”, even though that’s bollocks.

I reviewed it on PS4 and gave it an enthusiastic 8 out of 10. I got a death threat for that.

It wasn’t just Ubisoft taking pelters for that sort of thing either. All the way back in 2005, a pre-rendered trailer for Killzone 2 purported to show first-person gameplay—but definitely didn’t. It’s actually wild looking at this now that anyone thought it was real gameplay, but it speaks to the fact that consumers—gamers—are a lot more savvy about these things than they were back then.

And not only that, we’re far more concerned about our rights as consumers after decades of being battered by every publisher you can think of in every which way they can think of.

As much flack as gamers often get from people like me for being misinformed, entitled, angry weirdos, the majority of actual gamers—not the casuals or the outrage tourists, but the kind of people who know when Steam sales are on or when Summer Games Fest is happening, right?—the majority of those enthusiast consumers are pretty clued up.

I often think that the stories of No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077—both games who’ve been on a long road to redemption after failing utterly to live up to their marketing hype at launch—show that consensus can shift, that gamers do change their perceptions based on new information. That through hard work, investment, humility, and honesty, studios and well-known personalities in game development can go from pariah to darling.

People were calling Shawn Murray the heir to Peter Molyneux. That’s a career killer for someone in his position, but he’s managed to shake it off. And now No Man’s Sky is beloved. Personally, I think the 97 massive updates they’ve done for it are just polishing a turd. But this isn’t about me.

The point is this: the enthusiast gaming audience is sophisticated. Stop laughing—I’m being serious. They’re sophisticated, media literate, and a lot more savvy than the reputation they get from a very loud minority. And we’re not going to talk about them.

They’re not impressed by pre-rendered teasers because they know it has nothing to do with the end product. And if you’re going to tell them that it’s in-engine footage, real-time capture, genuine gameplay, running on console—no nonsense—you better not be lying about it, because there’s a lot of pixel counters out there who will catch you out.

And I’m not talking about Digital Foundry. I’m talking about random guys on Reddit who’ve just got nothing better to do.

Most publishers know this and would rather avoid the hassle of a scandal. Most people who work for big companies aren’t raving sociopaths in three-piece suits. They’re just normal people who frankly don’t want the egg.

That’s not to say that marketing isn’t full of absolute horseshit—because it is.

When a game trailer tells you it’s made from in-engine footage, for example, that could mean absolutely anything. It does not have to correspond whatsoever to the finished product as it plays. It could be running in-engine at one frame a second and sped up in post.

I mean, live-action Star Wars is made in Unreal Engine nowadays—it doesn’t mean anything.

As a disclaimer, when a publisher tells you “this was captured on PS5,” that’s a much more meaningful statement. As I’ve said, if they wanted to show you the game running at its best, they would surely capture on PS5 Pro, as some games are doing. Look at Silent Hill F—or they would capture on one of those aforementioned PCs they got from Area 51.

That’s the sort of thing that used to happen. Hell, it still does happen.

I used to make game trailers for a living, and I can tell you that even as recently as like three years ago when I was last doing it, it was still very common to produce multiplatform trailers from the absolute best capture possible—usually on PC—and just render out a bunch of versions with different pneumonics, different control prompts, etc.

I have literally had to sit there and paste Nintendo Switch button prompts over PlayStation-derived footage. Nine times out of ten, it’s not even nefarious—it’s just usually unfeasible to make bespoke trailers for specific platforms.

But in that situation, you’re hardly going to pick the worst-looking version of the thing, right? Usually Nintendo Switch.

There’s definitely been a shift in attitude recently when it comes to how games are showcased and how that serves an ever more savvy audience.

Sensational marketing is and will always be here to stay, of course. But the upshot of all this is that if you’ve got a PS5, you’re probably set for a long time. You’re not going to need to fork out for new hardware just to keep up with new releases for a long time yet.

And if you consider the fact that generational upgrades are beginning to show real diminishing returns now—because there’s only so much detail you can resolve in 4K, because there’s only so much time and money studios can spend on graphics.

And no, I don’t think AI is going to make up the difference in ways that anyone actually likes, because photorealism is a choice and not always the right one—because Moore’s law is dead.

Take your pick, man. We’re hitting every ceiling imaginable.

We’re never going to see the kinds of generational leaps we had years ago, like PS1 to PS2 or even PS3 to PS4. But I’m kind of okay with that, because as long as I’ve been alive, gaming is at its worst when people treat it like a tech product.

Whether that’s suits or punters, we’re all guilty of it. And it’s at its best when people treat it like a creative art.

It is, of course, a bit of both. But I don’t need to tell you which side of that equation should work in service of the other. And I also don’t need to tell you that the balance has always been wrong.

So, does captured on PS5 mean we’re in for a long generation? No.

And we know that plans are afoot for PS6 anyway. But I suspect we’re in for a much longer cross-gen period than we’re used to, as the global consumer economy remains firmly in the toilet—by design, frankly.

But that’s a whole other video. And by the time we get to PlayStation 7, it’ll be moot because you’ll either be jacking Roblox directly into your spinal cord or you’ll be a plane of sheet glass in an irradiated wasteland.

And I can’t decide which one of those I prefer, honestly.

Yeah, I’m not playing Roblox.

What was I saying anyway? Oh yeah—don’t worry about upgrading for GTA 6. You won’t have to, honestly.