And yet it happened here :p I wouldn't be surprised if my mother would mistake one of those thumbnail size pics for a genuine one. Heck, at a glance they look pretty real to me, and i know they're not.

It has less to do with DC looking good, and more to do with the shot being small. A well taken screen from Forza 5 would look pretty real at that size too. A fullscreen image of either though and yeah, that it's a game would be pretty obviously to almost anyone. As you say, DC doesn't look that good.

When I showed a friend of mine a video of Driveclub with weather effects he asked me about 3 times was this really a game and he is a huge PC gamer.

Because you know it's a game. Give these pictures to anyone who hasn't been cued in on what your intentions are and every single one of them would just accept them as real pictures. To them they would just think you were showing them a picture of a car. Out of context they wouldn't think 'could this be a game?' unless when you show them ANY picture they habitually think 'could this be a game?'

Show them this and they'd either think 'that's a good picture' or 'that's a nice car'. You'd have to scrutinise this to see if it was a game and to do that you'd have to already have been told. I KNOW this is a game but it still looks like a photo to me, so how the heck would someone who didn't know it was a game decide it's a game?:

I dunno. The ground and the rain effects on the Car window are the largest factors in that picture that would make me say it is a game, but it is photo-realistic (Very close), considering people have been fooled by it

I would have thought those were real too heh

Honestly if it weren't for already knowing I would probably assume they were real

Love your profile pic hat; where did you get it?

It would be fun if people began to fool car manufactures and professional photographers.