One thing they don't teach at university: 'Sometimes convenience and speed trumps fidelity'. Project schedules don't always allow room for producing high quality visualisations; the focus is often towards creating the actual product.
These renders were made in Autodesk's (now discontinued) Imagestudio software. At the time, it was a fast and lean piece of rendering software that produced some good quality renders with little effort. Of course, technology has come a long way since then, we now have hoverboards and personal jetpacks...