With nearly three decades in video games marketing to his name, Stephen Hey is one of the most experienced freelancers in the business. His career includes Marketing Director for EA studio Chillingo, leading lifestyle PR for Ocean Software and Infogrames, founding a games creative agency, and now freelancing for the likes of Wargaming, Bossa Studios and Merge Games. Stephen started his own consultancy HeyStephenHey in 2017. Stephen helps developers, publishers, educational and government bodies, and other companies working in the games industry with their marketing strategy.
We gave Stephen some questions we’ve heard from our customers, and he provided his take on game trailers. He also set off to get the opinion of industry experts to find out exactly how far the role of game video assets have evolved, who’s involved, how to do it right, and what comes next.
HOW IMPORTANT IS A TRAILER THESE DAYS?
After nearly thirty years of video games, I can tell you the fact that the quality of the trailer can ‘make or break a game’ is still valid. We only really started making trailers in the mid-nineties for trade shows or sizzle reels, but now they are critical to any game campaign. Trailers changed and redefined games marketing.
What I think about these days is where we are now with trailer creation, especially given today’s insanely powerful graphics cards and game engines. With the ability for more developers to create at that ‘top-of-the-pyramid level’, there are still ways to generate a marketing breakout with the release of a couple of minutes of well-edited gameplay.
WHAT’S AN EXAMPLE OF A TRAILER WITH HIGH IMPACT?
When first-person footage of the PS5 Ride 4 breakneck speed, motion sickness-inducing motorcycle race went viral at the end of September 2021, it wasn’t because it was remarkably different from other actual action-cam footage. The difference was that it wasn’t real; it was from a game.
The gameplay from ‘Ride 4’, shot from a motorcycle riders’ point of view, was incredibly realistic and enthralling. As the viewer bolted around a rain varnished circuit lit by a gloomily overcast sky, you could feel every lean, the terror of near-misses and feel the wind rushing past. This was ‘next gen’ gaming doing what it was meant to do – deliver the photorealistic gaming that gamers have dreamt of for decades. This game was already delivering the astonished “Looks like GoPro footage” Tweets in the thousands.
HOW CAN A GAMES COMPANY USE A TRAILER TO REACH BEYOND ITS FAN BASE?
Releasing long-form gameplay like what happened with Ride 4 could be something to think about if you have an addressable market outside of the conventional games segments, in this case, motorsports fans. By releasing a trailer that focused on the accuracy of the simulation, developers may engage with that secondary audience of real-world fans and convince them to give the thing they love so much, IRL, a chance in the virtual world.
HOW NECESSARY IS IT TO PUSH THE VISUAL LIMITS OF PHOTOREALISM IN A TRAILER AND BROADER MARKETING CAMPAIGN?
Today’s tech can deliver photorealism, ‘like being in a movie’ — but is that what everyone wants? I’ve talked to many colleagues in the industry about this, including the founder of Atomhawk and co-founder of the new agency Big Thursday, Ron Ashtiani. Ron told me, “The world has shifted away from realism now. Ten years ago, it was enough to have ‘realistic’ looking graphics to wow the player, but today you need more. When the PlayStation 3 and 4 and the Xbox 360 came along, there was a substantial jump in ‘realistic’ looking graphics. However, these worlds were usually created using brown and grey colour palettes. But today, there is a shift towards realism combined with wild colour or stylistic choices. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of this with its highly contrasting colours and lighting in a realistically rendered world.”
While an array of technical issues hampered Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, the vivid yellow and neon blues of its marketing campaign, key art (the ‘pack front’ images used on digital stores) and out of home advertising did an outstanding job of conveying its look across all media. Using your aesthetic consistently across all your assets and metadata is especially important. When it looks as strong as this, it can aid discoverability on stores that are as densely populated as the PlayStation Store or Steam.
WHAT CAN MAKE A TRAILER BREAK THROUGH THE NOISE?
It takes a lot to surprise the games industry and its fans, but at 2021’s Gamescom (Europe’s largest games show, held annually in Cologne, Germany), an open-world adventure called DokeV from developer Pearl Abyss was on everyone’s lips. The game takes the established Pokemon genre but radically appears to shake it all up with a look and feel that feels genuinely unique, all communicated by an eye-popping three-minute trailer. Ed Thorn from games site RockPaperShotgun said, “Unlike everything else, which made some sort of sense, this game took a bold choice and made none. It made no sense at all. All we got was a barrage on the senses, and I respect that rogue attitude. Instead of opting for a PowerPoint presentation like its peers, it just blared K-pop at everyone for three minutes and then moseyed off like it was nothing.”
The intoxicating trailer for DokeV felt familiar yet stunningly different; the city looked like other cities in games, the characters weren’t radically different, the actual gameplay wasn’t anything especially new. But it was just like taking a visual cold shower and immediately went viral, with many journalists calling it the game of the show even though no one got to play it. It showed the power of a unique aesthetic and how a successful style and theme can become a crucial asset for a game, a valuable part of the IP.
THAT’S GREAT FOR HIGH-PROFILE STUDIOS, BUT WHAT ABOUT MORE MODEST-SIZED BUSINESSES?
More often than not, when a game surprises, intrigues, or delights me with a new look, it comes from an Indie studio rather than one of the vast developers or publishers. With up to 300 games a week now being published on PC games platform Steam, games need to work hard to have a point of difference, and style and theme is often key to this. AAA teams may be hundreds of people, many specialising in ‘micro’ niches like vehicle physics. Indie teams are made from much smaller groups of people who are used to being more flexible and turning things around to short deadlines.
I asked Bossa Studios’ Studio Art Director, Ben Jane, for his take on this; “You can take more risks in the Indie world because the production times can be shorter. You pay a premium with AAA because of the attention to detail and the quality of execution, and this takes so much more time, it’s harder to take risks. As an Indie, you can be more forgiving and reactive because your budgets are hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of millions.
However, AAA studios are pushing the boundaries, ‘Ratchett & Clank: A Rift Apart’ on PlayStation 5 is just jaw-dropping gorgeous and delivers a unique style,” said Ben.
IF THE GAME’S AESTHETICS ARE BECOMING AS SOPHISTICATED AND COMPELLING AS BIG-BUDGET FILMS, WHAT’S THE PURPOSE OF A TRAILER?
For marketing, trailers are still essential. A great new ‘breakthrough’ trailer sits at the top of the marketing funnel in creating awareness for your game.
I asked Sam Roberts, creative producer at game trailer house DoubleJump, for his opinion; “The cinematic game trailer is not dead; it is still absolutely the best way to sell a game. Two minutes of punchy editing, with clear, precise use of music and sound effects, will not be going away anytime soon,” he said.
But while a powerful ‘impact’ trailer is one of the most vital assets for a campaign, it is not the only video asset. Modern game campaigns will be made up of tens or even hundreds of pieces of video. Look at the official video channel for the incredible Forza Horizon 5, which lists about 30 video assets just on YouTube alone, ranging from deep dives into the recording of SFX to episodes of a Forza 5 Horizon magazine show.
And this isn’t just the big AAA titles; a roster of assets can be powerful for any game. Curating a community and building a tidal wave of support, even for the most ‘indie’ of titles, is vital in a market where 200+ games launch on Steam every week. So for campaigns to succeed, they need to have multiple videos, each with different objectives. An impact trailer will be about getting eyeballs, but then the engaged parts of that broad audience will want to know more about how a game plays. Interviews with developers and ‘making of’ mini-documentaries will bring your community closer to the developers and breed loyalty to the game. Unique gameplay mechanics can be demonstrated in shorter, focused ‘mechanics’ trailers, and you may want to spotlight the ‘craft’ behind your game with profiles of some of the team who created it. Again, these needn’t be the preserve of AAA — take this example for Creature in the Well.
HOW WILL EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES CHANGE THE WAY GAME TRAILERS ARE CREATED?
The new generation of consoles is now with us in the form of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and they are powerful machines. Their graphics capabilities are unique, including the much-heralded ray tracing, by which scenes are rendered by simulating the actual rays of light in a game. This technique makes for much more realistic looking games and has been used in the tv and movie production industry for years, and the new consoles can render scenes using ray tracing on the fly.
Lighting Directors have long been a part of tv and film making specialised in creating light and mood for each scene. Now we have similar capabilities in games, and we will see similar roles evolve here. It would not surprise me that game trailer creators move from being ‘editors’ to fully-fledged cinematographers. In this video promo for Call of Duty: Vanguard, actual war photographers were sent ‘into the game’ to capture stills, and the results were stunning. Send a movie director in instead, and you are going to get some earth-shattering footage.
To go with the new hardware, there are new tools.
Unreal 5 is the latest version of Epic’s mighty game engine and comes fully loaded with graphics capabilities that promise to take things to another level. We’ll start seeing Unreal 5 crafted games soon with ‘Redfall’, ‘Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2’ and ‘STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl’ as well as many more on the way.
Epic has made Unreal 5 with cross-industry appeal, and Unreal has already been used in close to 200 movies and tv shows to date including ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘Westworld’. I think this will breed more cross-fertilisation of both game and movie industries, with each learning from the other. We’ll see this reflected in games and the video assets we use to promote them and maybe a blurring of the lines resulting in productions that create both games and TV shows from AAA IP. If you invest in building a virtual world in an engine that can be used for games and tv, why not make both?
WHAT CAN STUDIOS AND PUBLISHERS DO TO MAXIMIZE THE IMPACT OF THEIR VIDEO ASSETS IN A GAME TRAILER?
Marketing starts at day one, it should be embedded in the game’s design, and this applies as much to a one-person Indie studio production as a 200 person AAA franchise. This should include the development of a style guide, including a colour palette branding, even the beginnings of the key art and UI design elements. The games that do this well are recognisable just from a screenshot, for example, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, ‘Untitled Goose Game’ and ‘Hades’. The graphic language must be consistent across all assets, and this can only succeed where there is full collaboration between development and marketing.
If videographers are an entwined part of this, you give your game the best chance to have maximum impact. So work closely with them and bring them in earlier than you might think necessary to start thinking about how they could create that first ‘impact’ trailer or teaser piece.
Developers can go further still and add modes in games that allow professional game videographers to go into games like a cameraman would go into a warzone, as in the COD film mentioned earlier. Dedicated game video houses like DoubleJump and Big Thursday can explore a game from the raw build. They know how Unreal and Unity works and, if given the option, can go into the game to choose camera positions, light scenes, create tracking shots and capture incredible footage that is still ‘in engine’. This footage can then be used for video and static assets and allow the very best rendering of the game to be captured without taking valuable time from the developer team.
Finally, think about how the trailers will be consumed. When briefing in trailers and consumer videos or choosing footage, think of the devices
people will be watching them on. Very few people will be watching on the top-level equipment that edit houses and studios have. Often, these videos are being consumed on a phone screen (usually while the viewer is also doing other things on other screens). So don’t assume that the stunning visual detail and ear chewing audio will be experienced by everyone. Aim for the best scenario, of course, but imagine the worst!
ANY LAST WORDS OF ADVICE FROM YOUR 30 YEARS OF MARKETING GAMES?
Sure! Marketers and producers of game trailers should experiment, have fun, play with the tropes and challenge the preconceptions. Take inspiration from movie trailers, watch as many game trailers as you can and take note of the ones with lots of views even though the game may be relatively small or indie. Think about trailers and other assets from day one – even when concepting games because moving images sell games today more than ever and the trailer, those narrow slices of games, need to cut through more than ever before.
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