Capturing the Essence of Games with Game Trailers

In a brief period, game trailers have the power to encapsulate what a game is about, its mechanics, stories, and characters. Game trailers offer valuable glimpses into what games are, informing a viewer’s interest levels and their purchasing decisions. Much like a movie trailer, game trailers are an essential part of the game’s marketing campaign and aim to faithfully condense a game into a brief clip to garner interest and build anticipation.

Though this all sounds easy on paper, there is a meticulous methodology to determining the structure of game trailers and importantly, what’s included in them. At Igloo Gaming, we have extensive experience crafting game trailers for a myriad of different gaming projects and deeply understand the do’s and don’t’s of crafting game trailers.

Core Elements of Faithful Game Trailers

Game trailers that most faithfully represent their games tend to have multiple things in common. For the most part, game trailers should aim to showcase the most distinct and interesting elements of the game. This could include its most interesting characters or story beats, gameplay sections, or any other aspects that represent the game well.

It’s critical to be consistent in the game trailer’s portrayal of the game. For example, if it’s a tower defense game, tower defense gameplay should be included. It shouldn’t feature gameplay clips that could mislead players into thinking the game is from another genre. Similarly, characters featured in a game trailer should be representative of their in-game counterparts – they should be characterized the same way and not act in a way that could be jarring for players encountering them during the game.

Visual and Narrative Consistency in Game Trailers

Visually, we always aim to keep our game trailers consistent with the game they’re representing, as seen in game trailers we’ve crafted like The Goombles. We begin this process by taking stock of the game’s art, concept art, and assets, to discover what best represents the game and what could be included in the trailer. Ultimately, game trailers should be informative, so we aim to showcase what’s included in the game – its most interesting characters, gameplay elements, and distinct features – and highlight these. When viewers see our game trailers, we want them to think ‘I can’t wait to experience this in the game.’

For game trailers featuring narratives and characters, we want to showcase enough so that potential players are interested without showing too much and risking spoiling the story experience. When we work on game trailers, we engage in extensive conversations with the development team to understand the characters and story as best as possible and gain insight into how they want players to feel when experiencing their game. With this knowledge, we bake the emotional resonance as much as possible into our game trailers, whether that’s frightening players with horror game trailers or making them feel good with lighthearted casual games.

Discussion with the development studio is incredibly valuable when crafting game trailers. They will know the unique aspects they want to showcase and feel could be game-selling features. 

Things to Avoid When Crafting Game Trailers

In the realm of casual games, it’s not uncommon to see misleading trailers that showcase gameplay, story, and characters that are unrelated to the game itself. Above all, it’s imperative to avoid falsifying what the game is in this fashion. Regardless of intentions, creating misleading game trailers can damage a studio’s reputation and cause a backlash at the cost of high clickthrough rates but bad conversion rates. This, in turn, can mean the game’s storefront pages will receive bad ratings and rank poorly.

Igloo Gaming is an expert services provider of video production and animation services for gaming projects. From game trailers to user acquisition videos and everything in between, we can deliver gaming video content in any style to a high quality. Contact us today to learn more!

As part of Magic Media, we offer a wide range of services for gaming, entertainment, and tech projects such as full-cycle game development, real-time VFX, and more. Get in contact today, and let’s create magic!