Game Trailers
This week’s post is about game trailers. Given that this is the first “real” game I’ve worked on, I’ve never put together a game trailer. Steam considers a game trailer “optional”, but highly recommended. Star Jet Alpha is registered for Steam Next Fest the first week of October and a game trailer is considered a must-have.
I came across an interesting article about how Steam players see your game. This article is written by an indie developer who has 1 published game on Steam with another coming out soon. The article was written in September 2019, so it is a bit dated at this point. One of the comments was -
“…[The] person wishlisted the game after they thought the game’s capsule image was cute, watched 13 seconds of an animated gif version of the trailer, read 12 words of the short description, SKIPPED the trailer, looked at exactly 4 screenshots (which took all of 5.5 seconds), checked 5 user-defined tags, jumped over the full-text description, glanced at the curators, and skimmed through 1 negative review.”
The author goes on to state that this person was not some gifted speed-reader. In fact, the author draws some interesting conclusions from this qualitative study.
Okay, so if the person skipped the trailer, why does Steam highly recommend having one? Obviously, game trailers can be delivered through other mediums such as YouTube and TikTok. I’m sure there are also some players out there that do watch the first few seconds of a game trailer on the Steam page. The advice I’ve received is that the key is to highlight the best action/gameplay shots within the first 5 - 10 seconds of the trailer. Given that there are thousands of games on Steam, every developer is competing for “eyeball” time. People are easily bored in today’s world so you have to grab their attention as quickly as possible.
I referenced Nick Popovich’s GDC 2019 talk in my last post. Nick points out that in today’s world, there is just so much content available that people have necessarily become very picky about how they spend their time. A game’s actual competition is not just other games, but other content as well.
Nick Popovich at GDC 2019 - Making Games That Stand Out and Survive
Hence the need for a tight, well-edited game trailer. It autoplays when a player hits the Steam page and will hopefully catch their eye enough to dig into additional information about the game.
Video editing is not something that I have much experience with. This aspect of game development is interesting to me, but not something I feel I need to burn time on at the moment. Especially if I’m going to have a game trailer ready for Steam Next Fest. I’m currently working with a group called Trailer Squad to help put the trailer together. For a first-time indie developer, they seem pretty budget friendly and the trailers they showcase on their site look good. So far they’ve been good to work with.
BTW, I found Trailer Squad through a recommendation by Derek Lieu at Derek Lieu Creative. I reached out to Derek after watching some of his YouTube videos. His portfolio and background are incredibly impressive, but his services are a bit on the high-end (as you would expect). If you have a decent marketing budget, I highly recommend reaching out to Derek. Obviously, I will post updates as to my experience with Trailer Squad. Like I said - so far, so good. They’ve given me great feedback on the script I put together and technical advice for how to properly record gameplay footage for this to use in the trailer.
As always, I’m interested in feedback in the comments section below!