Game trailers, as a piece of your marketing efforts, are often an invaluable tool to draw players in and attract a larger potential audience. They capture the spirit of your game, showing off key features, gameplay mechanics, story beats, and early characterization in a short and engaging format. Their purpose is to engage players who are interested in your game and those who might be unaware or not yet sold on your title. Game trailers are a key tool in building anticipation!
Let’s take a look at some key elements in creating your own quality game trailer and how teams like Magic Media collaborate with you to deliver perfect video game trailers.
The Fundamentals of Great Video Game Trailers
Trailers are meant to capture players, capture their imaginations and draw them into your world. Your story, the game’s setting, the visual aesthetic, these things are what most often draws players in and puts them in a state of wanting more of your game. The best game trailers out there capture these things in a succinct and engaging way, taking the most entertaining and interesting parts of your creation and delivering them in style to players.
As you collaborate on a game trailer’s design, or create one yourself, always keep in mind that it should be showing off the best and most interesting elements. Focus on actual characters, story beats, striking set pieces and gameplay moments. Your game trailer needs to accurately reflect your game’s genre and style to attract the proper audience. Otherwise you risk not attracting your intended audience and alienating and frustrating players further down the line.
Additionally, consistency is key! This is a motto to follow in many facets of game development and video production. Both in tone and aesthetic but also in what is displayed during this trailer. If your mage hurls a fireball in the trailer and then only chucks measly cinders in game, that is just frustrating. If your tower defense game lacks the elements of that format, you’re going to mislead players and that ends in frustration.
Artistic Consistency in Video Game Trailers
We cannot emphasize this point enough! If your game has a simplistic and isometric graphics style, that allows players to focus more on the artistic composition and shape of the world, don’t create a trailer that is photorealistic and detailed! Consistency is everything in maintaining tone and style, otherwise it can be jarring and frustrating for players.
Your game trailer’s visual style needs to be appropriate and match the game’s art and assets. Our video production team can help in selecting the elements that best capture and represent your game’s experience. In this way, the trailer is both engaging and informative of the gameplay within.
Many game trailers also feature narrative elements and character beats to provide interest and elevate hype for the future release. It’s important in this avenue of content to reveal a limited amount of detail. These character moments and story beats need to remain mostly hidden to not spoil the experience or give away too much. These key moments inform the tone of the game and the narrative journey players will go on. When creating a video trailer, collaborate with your narrative and design team to understand precisely what emotional experience this game aims to create. From there, you can really refine and focus the trailer down to capture the right tone.
Working with your Developers for Great Game Trailers
Whether an internal team is creating the trailer or you’re working a video production service provider like Magic Media’s video team, there are a few key groups that need to be consulted when creating great video game trailers. The game development team are the ones who intimately understand the game’s mechanics and what its unique aspects and the kinds of features that might draw in more users!
Like a lot of our work, we always recommend strong collaboration and communication across all teams. Internally and externally, a clear and direct communication pipeline helps to cut down on confusion and aids in the execution of directed and pinpoint precision in delivering a game’s vision.
Critical Video Game Trailer Tip
It’s been mentioned in parts above but the most important thing in delivering video game trailers is to keep it honest. Players hate nothing more than being misled! If your game trailer doesn’t represent your actual gameplay, at least somewhat, you’re going to get bad feedback and results.
Negative feedback and poor ratings are like a snowball, once they come in, people flock and bandwagon onto them. Your reputation can certainly take a hit if the issue is bad enough. Keep it authentic, keep it honest, and you’ll maintain your players’ trust. Focus on making a good game and a cool trailer that captures its style and feeling and you’ll have a good base to convert interest into sales.
Take advantage of Magic Media’s A-Z service offerings today and create magic with your game. Contact us today to utilize our wealth of services such as game trailers, game development, art production, game VFX, cybersecurity, and much more!
