When a game is announced, it's common to witness CGI trailers that don't accurately represent what you end up playing. If that announcement is closer to a tease than a full-on reveal, one can reasonably assume that the game isn't ready to be shown or is still early in development. In those cases, I wouldn't blame anyone for wondering if there's really much of any game at all behind the scenes. But it's pretty rare for a studio to just come out and say that their hands were kind of empty when a game was unveiled.
