Game Trailers

Something I happen to notice during my time here is the lack of trailers for upcoming games.
Trailers have been used in the mainstream game industry and even the indie game industry for as long as there has been an industry in order to advertise and build up hype for upcoming game projects and i think it might be time for our community to do the same.
As games in our community start to becoming more widespread with games even ending up on steam i think its time bigger projects embrace a more professional approach in this regard, plus even teaser trailers are enough to spark community interest in an upcoming game.
The only time a project gets major publicity in the community usually during Gain jams or Belly Direct hence I believe the ability to promote game projects should be more up to wider standard.
The only games in the community outside of Gain Jam and Belly Direct I’ve seen use trailers as a successful marketing tool is the Five Nights With Fatties series which led to massive success of the series to the extent a 3rd game is curently in the works.
I just wanted to open up a dialougue about the use of trailers in the community as I believe they should be used more but what do you guys think?

4 Likes

While I agree that trailers would definitely be nice, there’s a fair amount of work involved in making a good trailer that might not be feasible for solo or small dev teams.
Even in AAA spaces the version of the game used for the trailer is usually a cobbled together build that’s barely holding together, with a chunk of time spent getting it “trailer ready” instead of working on features that will stay. Even if the coding is ironed out enough, you have to have enough polished art assets and music. And even after all that, you have to actually open up your recording and editing software of choice and edit the trailer together, which is an art in of itself.
That being said, teasers are definitely a helpful tool for getting attention/building hype. Even screenshots are nice and only require art assets and a halfway decent image editor (don’t have to debug or do video editing on a screenshot!).

4 Likes

I think another reason why people don’t want to hype their projects up to much is that they don’t wanna be like beyond good and evil 2 or something like that.

though the big reason why people don’t, I think, is just that most are not very marketing savvy. alot of projects doesn’t even have screenshots.

another related thing I would want to see more often (at least for the more gamey games) is the use of gifs to show off the game

3 Likes

I gotta agree with chubberdy and yam here. We already get tons of people just linking to their games and providing little or no description and 0 screens. Lets start with the absolute bare minimum?

2 Likes

Trailers cost money and require having marketing budget capital BEFORE a game is even finished. Unless a game has enough money behind it to justify the ROI of a trailer, there will not be a trailer; this isn’t only the case with niche 1-3 person dev team fetish games. It’s a fact of game development that they cost a lot of money to make. The more elaborate a trailer is, the more it saps funding and time from actual development work.

If the project is commercial, then sure, it’s a good idea to market your shit. But given the scale of this website, a trailer SPECIFICALLY for the audience here is an obscene waste of time. If you are here, then you are actively seeking out games with WG content. You don’t NEED to market your game.

Neither of these are games.

3 Likes