Going heavy on gaming with a launch for a Rs 12,999 phone isn’t really the wisest move, yet realme chose to do just that with the realme Narzo 50 launch event, even getting an “esports streamer” onboard to run tests. The whole thing was obviously heavily scripted but playing a pre-recorded clip instead of actually gaming on the device took things a bit too far.
Now, there’s frankly not much to hold up against the event itself which was a unique one, showing off the phone’s specs with an amusing 5-round competition. But in one of the rounds that required a quick-scope kill on Free Fire to win, realme messed up big time by trying to pass off recorded footage as actual gameplay (via RMleaks).
If you skip to 10:15 on the video for the launch, you’ll see a pause button pop up on one of the participant’s ‘gameplay’ triggered by an unwarranted touch on the screen. The interface looks to be of Google Photos, which is enough proof of the round not being the real deal.
realme’s reason for doing this remains unclear. Surely it wasn’t impossible to get a streamer to achieve a no-scope? Or did the company not have enough faith in the realme Narzo 50’s gaming abilities?
The latter seems unlikely given the final round of the event where the gameplay looked legit and lag-free. Also, Free Fire is not a demanding game at all and can run fairly well on the cheapest of post-2020 smartphones.
While there are quite some unanswered questions here, it is worth mentioning that an incident like this isn’t a first-time affair. Last year, the company was caught streaming iPhone game footage and promoting it as being from the realme Narzo 30A. The blunder was blamed on “a wrong file being accidentally sent to the producer” back then, so it would be interesting to see realme’s justification this time.
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