A number of things apparently gave it away, including small patches of brown trees being rendered around garbage incinerators to represent pollution. While that’s actually quite funny, some residents and internet users criticized the developer for failing to note that the image was a screenshot from the game. Residents in particular seemed to indicate that the image’s use demonstrated the cavalier attitude the developer was taking the project as a whole.

But how does that make any sense? Developers typically include renderings of future projects in pitch material. Those renderings are usually created by graphical artists that specialize in that sort of thing. But if Cities:Skylines is simply good enough at depicting residential neighborhoods that one can create a rendering within the game and use that instead, how is that anything other than pretty neat? Now, in this case, it seems that Lanpro used a neighborhood created in the game by another player. But, again, so what? As Lanpro’s Chris Leeming notes, it’s not like this is the first time a developer has used images from the game to pitch a project.