EA in trouble for misleading Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09: All-Play ads

The Advertising Standards Authority have a bone to pick with EA. Remember awhile ago when we told you that game devs/pubs were no longer allowed to show CG footage, and pass it off as gameplay? Well…EA didn’t do that, but they did use footage from the 360 version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 in a commercial for the Wii version, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09: All-Play. This is what EA told the ASA, but the ASA wasn’t happy about it…

“They (EA) explained that Wii footage would not be of broadcast quality, and the originating agency had thought it preferable to use the Xbox footage, which was closer to broadcast definition, than to ‘up the resolution’ of Wii footage to broadcast quality. Although we acknowledged that the message ‘available on all formats’ appeared in the final scene, we considered that viewers would infer from the ad that Tiger Woods was playing the game on a Wii console and the graphics shown behind him were representative of the actual game he was playing,” said the watchdog. Because viewers would not be able to achieve the graphical quality shown in the ad on a Wii console, we concluded that the ad was misleading.” - ASA

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