In the world of game trailers, no two trailers are the same. Different types of game trailers have different qualities and goals. Gameplay trailers aim to showcase a title’s main gameplay features to the viewer. In contrast, narrative game trailers seek to highlight basic character information and a premise to hook in potential players.
Regardless of the game trailer’s type, some must-know steps are involved in crafting high-quality game trailers that resonate with your target audience. Whether you’re highlighting gameplay, narrative, or even downloadable content, these steps below will help ensure your game trailers are of the highest possible quality.
Knowing Your Game Trailer’s Audience
Above all, it’s critical to understand who your game trailer is for. Understanding your audience is naturally important for any kind of video production, but given the extensive range of game genres, visual styles, narratives, and combinations thereof, it’s non-negotiable to fully understand your game trailer’s audience.
This knowledge can inform the creative direction of your game trailer. For example, if the game revolves around serious topics for a mature audience and your game trailer is expected to highlight its narrative and characters, possible aspects to explore could include a darker or muted color palette to reflect the subject matter, the proportional amount of focus on characters relative to the game trailer’s length, and which specific story beats to highlight.
Game Trailers Should Showcase Unique Selling Points
One way to ensure your game trailers resonate with the target audience is by showcasing the game’s unique aspects. Many games find success off the back of distinct features, such as Minecraft’s focus on mining materials and crafting that’s only limited by imagination and Fortnite’s huge sandbox that allows players to engage in countless different activities.
If your game has distinct aspects, no matter how small, it’s important to showcase them prominently during game trailers. Even if it’s something as simple as a new twist on leveling mechanics or new weapons in action-oriented games, it’s worth highlighting to show in no uncertain terms that your game is doing something new.
Usage of Gameplay Footage
It goes without saying that game trailers should contain gameplay footage, but to what degree depends on what your trailer is trying to achieve. For gameplay-focused trailers that aim to showcase mechanics and features, gameplay footage should be present throughout the majority of the game trailer. For narrative trailers or anything else less focused on gameplay-related features, a blend of gameplay footage and cinematics would be more appropriate.
Narrative Arcs in Game Trailers
Even game trailers that specifically highlight gameplay features benefit from even a minor narrative arc that ties the entire trailer together. Even if, for example, your new game trailer showcases a couple of specific character abilities, the game trailer can be constructed in a way that presents a story around them. Perhaps it can highlight how the abilities are acquired and how they can become empowered during the various stages of the player’s journey in-game, or if they’re acquired from a meaningful story event.
Audio Choices in Game Trailers
Choosing what sounds and music to include in trailers is a pivotal decision and can influence how a game trailer is received. It’s common practice to include original music from a game’s soundtrack to tease what’s to come in the full release, plus the authentic sound effects that are used in-game. For some games, different choices can be made to create a compelling game trailer, just like how some developers choose to include versions of contemporary music to appeal to a wider audience.
Visually Impressive Shots in Game Trailers
Nothing contributes to the wow factor in game trailers quite like including some of the most visually impressive shots you can from a game. Displays of impressive game VFX are a clever way to go, as the visually compelling nature of these effects can provide an easy method of getting viewers to watch the game trailer for its duration. It’s advisable to be selective when choosing what clips to include, as certain moments and set pieces could be considered spoiler territory, which is best avoided to prevent ruining the game’s experience.
Optimizing Game Trailers for Different Platforms
To gain maximum exposure, it’s important to prepare your game trailers for different platforms. All the major social media platforms can make use of different aspect ratios, with further aspect ratios being used depending on whether it’s being posted directly to feeds or stories. It’s critical to understand the differences in advance of optimizing your game trailers so they look as best they can on various platforms.
Simply posting a game trailer to YouTube might not be enough to gain the attention of the audience you want, so making preparations for different platforms is essential.
Iterating Game Trailers
It’s a great achievement to complete a game trailer. Once it’s fully edited, the opener is compelling, and the closing leaves the viewer wanting more, it can feel like your job is fully done, but this is rarely the case.
To achieve maximum efficiency with your game trailers, it’s important to test them, receive feedback, and iterate on them. A popular method of effectively iterating on game trailers is by using A/B testing, which tests two different versions of a trailer to see which is more popular with the viewers. With their feedback, it’s possible to continually refine your game trailers until they’re perfectly engaging to your target audience.
Using a Call to Action
Simply creating and releasing game trailers to inform the audience about an upcoming game is effective at generating interest, but this can be taken a step further with a relevant call to action. By encouraging activity at the conclusion of your game trailer, you can understand general interest better by tracking the number of sign-ups, downloads, or whatever it is you choose your call to action to be.
Be Wary of Showing Too Much
Typically, game trailers aim to captivate the audience to the point where they are inclined to purchase and play the game. The most effective game trailers reveal just enough information, such as gameplay, characters, and settings, to spark viewers’ interest in exploring the game more closely.
Showcasing too much of a game can leave viewers feeling as though they don’t need to experience more of the game, and that the trailer highlighted enough to satisfy their interest completely. Avoiding this at all costs is critical for the sake of the trailer’s effectiveness and the game itself.
Contact Magic Media today to learn more about our range of services, including game trailer production, and other services for gaming, entertainment, and tech projects, including full-cycle game development, game VFX, and dozens more. Reach out to Magic Media, and let’s create magic!
