Deadly Sins of Trailer Making: how to avoid some of the most costly mistakes in videogames marketing

foreign [Music] not the most popular topic hey trailers anybody in the hall making a trail right now for that game what two three oh oh so you're gonna relate to the pain right because it's gonna be a lot about pain so I am Xenia I'm Xenia Coster I live in Amsterdam and I'm a marketing freelancer I call myself a marketing mercenary because Publishers hire me to do the heavy lifting of Performance Marketing these are some of the games that I was lucky to work on in the last years I've been working on PC on consoles that's my favorite I've been doing a lot of mobile

and VR as well and was focusing on VR in the last year and my personal deepest skill set has to do with Performance Marketing so I make paid ads for PC and console games basically it means that I take a marketing budget anything from two thousand to one hundred thousand dollars I put it into Facebook's Googles and Tick Tock you name it any platform then I do a bit of alchemy I brew it and voila dollars turn into wish lists or sold copies that's what I do but today my rent is about trailers and I hate them I hate video game trailers because as a viewer I personally find that they are boring there's not enough message for the links that the uh as a gamer I try to remember last game that I bought because the trailer was cool well no I have friends friends tell me which games

we're gonna play I just go on the store Page hit the purchase button it doesn't impact my decision at all and then as a professional I think the process that we've built for trailer making in our industry is one of the worst we've made so far I see it so many times that the studio and the publisher gather together everybody wastes their time everybody's trying to make the trailer great then the result is mediocre nobody's happy it's a compromise of everybody's opinion and why did we even bother well I'll explain why we bother reason number one and that's the biggest one we are forced by environment yesterday if you wanted to talk about how people choose games on Steam in the games on Steam they had a very good heat map of how steam store attention span looks everything goes to the trailer about 50 percent of time people look at

that trailer so we do not have a choice we must have a trailer and it's valid for all the major platforms the attention weight of a trailer is enormous so this is the first impression that we make and then there's a second reason that I personally like way more it is because we are chasing an opportunity after all trailers are made so that people love our games and that our studios are rich and famous and a trailer a great trailer is a very cost efficient way of becoming rich and famous there are following perks that you can gain with a trailer right and we all know this that's winning attention and in our Market in our economy attention is worth the dollars second is improving sentiment making those people really love what we're doing third recruit Advocates it's so much easier for your Advocates to say and share their hype for the upcoming game with their friends if there is a good

trailer impulse buy a reputation that the list goes on and honestly these opportunities really outweigh the risks that coming that come in with a bad trailer and we all know those it's maybe a bit of wasted resources a bit of time and money wasted there is sometimes a case of mismanaged expectations that one is a bit worse that is when the trailer presents an experience that is different from the game that yeah the trailer is for and finally there is sometimes a complete missing the mark and we make a bad first impression which is not the end of the world but it sadly happens very often in general the opportunity really outweighs the risk so what I tell to myself so Xenia it is okay that you hate trailers but you cannot ignore them in your work your marketing professional you must make

trailers you must watch them this is why I do then second issue I mentioned that I do pay that right usually trailers is something that NPC and console world is given to Brand managers product marketing sometimes game producer but definitely not the paid ads people um but I have an idea for you how about this one next time that you need an opinion that you need feedback for your trailer draft bring it to your pay that's person instead of bringing it to the focus group and just let me explain why it's a good idea I have made a diagram it's a diagram about audience trust how we build it how we monetize it how we Market to build that trust let's imagine three players and how they learn about the game so the dog learned it from a friend a

friend said it's a good game they go and purchase the game the bear learned it from her favorite YouTuber who made a review she goes on Steam buys the game and then there's the Frog these are the guys that I bring they click on paid ads on Facebook many of you don't they do and they can be anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of your sales well you of course you will always have the dogs and the bears but the frogs their opportunity too why miss out on them now let's imagine out of three gamers that we see here who actually watches a trailer who actually needs it and I'll bet you this the dog just pushes purchase because the dog is with his back the bear well we'll just check that it's exactly the game that the review was about the frog the frog is the worst and I work with them what they do is they go

Excel you got me on your store Page impress me now they watch the trailer like nobody else this is why I as a person who does pay that am super sensitive if your trailer is good enough because my job hangs on it my Roi hangs on it now I'm very very very particular about how it needs to look now now that I kind of explain why I care about the subject so much um let me talk about the seven deadly sins the stuff that they found works really horrible for your trailers and probably you should never do and I'll start with my favorite one vanity I think anybody who worked on a trailer has seen this scene when the brand manager they're making the trailer and they're bringing the version number three to the game producer the producer

stroks cartoon she counts something on her fingers she rewinds it she puts it Forward back and then she says something along these lines fun cut cool music where are 27 USPS that I mentioned well look sometimes I know like the game has 12 unique worlds each with a beautiful biome and unrepeatable bosses but that does not mean that all of them need to go to the trailer the trailer isn't there to tickle our vanity we need to focus on what's really important what really sells if we're talking about worlds definitely no caves even if it's fun in the game caves just look bad I don't want them in my trailer so the cure for this is first and foremost to define a USP list focus on what matters as a team and honestly there are seven features stops it never gets more than that

this is a good startup package that I always start from and 90 of the games need just this so first limit who you're addressing by naming the platform and hardcoreness especially important for VR because it's confused with a mobile game every day then two three genre keywords and please remember that on Steam when people choose their new game they search by keywords they need to recognize them those should be set in stone for your game uh then uh there are there's the setting the world of your game and this one the looser you keep it for the creative team the better it's just a list of do's and don'ts and no real pinpointing of this and that um characters and last but definitely not least the story arc like what is this Quest is it a traditional treasure Quest the gamer needs to immediately recognize what narrative they're introduced to there is a lot of

enjoyment in recognition and we keep forgetting that because the happiness of the user comes from recognizing going I've seen this somewhere so we're not making a particular egos we're making trailers to present features and while you're at it a little life hack when you're approved pre-approving the USP list in pre-production before the creative brief also pre-approve the text plates that are going into the trailer so that everybody agrees that we call our game team-based shooter rather than a co-op adventure for instance these final takes place will save you a lot of time and many re-edits now SIN number two that's my favorite very stupid kpis but I always just start for the first one especially people who do make trailers right now you do have kpis right with numbers for your trailer what

exactly you expect to make well I believe that of course you do but then I will be very self-centric here and there will be two types there will be kpis that I like and there will be KPS that I don't like uh and I'll start with what I don't like many trailers are made to show some form of reach like 10 million whatever so what I don't like is when that reach is on own channels like own YouTube or own Facebook well that's not a good idea because that channel of triangle Factory has two and a half K subscribers and has 9 000 views how many are paid I don't care how many I paid because the good kpi is reach on platform channels because the same trailer on metaquest channel that was a VR game got 39K views and also look you're immediately next to a competitor that got 12K views and it

already puts things into perspective right are you doing a good job or not a good job this is why reach on platform channels matters more now a second type is conversion many trailers are measured if the conversion of the store Page is good the worst way of doing it is just taking all the traffic and going like okay it converts at one percent I guess it's not really good please don't do that don't do combined traffic go for singled out type of traffic there is specifically a huge difference in motivation and conversion of people who are paid versus people who are organic and uh splitting those up of course in some platforms is a bit tough but you can always do it at least I find a way to split it even on Steam and yeah UTM tracking doesn't work but they're always um so now that we've covered conversion and reach I will digress on one of my

favorite topics which is sentiment who thinks that sentiment is a good quality index for a trailer like does it even matter because we know that haters are gonna hate and well sometimes we have toxic communities right sometimes we make first person shooters our Gamers don't like us uh well let me tell you a true story so once upon a time in Spring 2023 there were two ad campaigns they had a beautiful video they had some texts they were hanging on Instagram and Facebook and they were advertising a new game so one ad campaign it was loved people said that it's amazing that they effing love it users actually thanked their friends under it and said that Kathleen definitely needs to show this to Zach and they love the voiceover they love

the footage everything was great but I said there were two campaigns the other campaign Faith was a bit different for it users hated it the sentiment was not great they said that it looks bad they wrote long comments on how the gaming Market is not what it used to be and then they also even called they advertising bad names well it really hurt it really hurt and uh because I'm a seasoned marketer before going like oh yeah we're turning this off because there's a bunch of haters under it that go like yeah it doesn't even matter um yeah well the secondary kpis were showing that the liked one was saved and shared the not liked video wasn't saved or shared yep makes sense and trickling all the way down when I looked at return on ad spend actually the campaign that was loved was making US Dollars the campaign that was

hated would never return on investment but this is where the plot thickens because what if I told you was the same video it was the same ad everything was the same except for target audience one was interest based targeting and it was returning on investment pretty nicely the other was a look-alike based on people who purchased the game and it didn't work now look at the sentiment it's it's not good to ignore the sentiment yeah we should use it as a kpi but we cannot please everybody so yes sentiment of target audience is a good kpi while sentiments in general might not be one so as long as you allow it as one of the kpis you can also think about what emotions you want to evoke with your trailer so returning to those stupid kpis let's

not make them let's design our kpis because kpis are created to align teams on our goals kpis are a very easy way of understanding if we're hitting it or not hitting it on the business side and let's just think one step further than reach of 10 million in general or Martha the CMO loved it that those are not kpis we need something that actually moves the needle for the business now uh SIN number three is ignoring the context and I've got one more true story for you so that was a steam page for an indie game I still crack up when I think about it the trailer was all spooky it was really scary horror-like there were glitches in The Matrix the music got dense there was guitar with Distortion big scary antagonists were rising and meanwhile the description on the right literally said in our hell of a horror game you

defeat the evil corporation that turns office workers into zombies that was a quick spoiler how are you supposed to be afraid of something you know that you're gonna even win and I understand it was earlier stage was before early access so they just took their short description from their pitch deck but please don't forget about that um context awareness it starts with good questions questions like how are they gonna watch it is the screen big is it the TV is it the smartphone is it vertical is it square is the sound on that all of these are actually quite important and as well knowing if the user is um logged in right now on your on their device and what is the average attention span for that exact platform um and the Cure is always to dig ux I believe that we all should dig ux we

need to Google it we need to research it we need to watch people buy games why they buy them how they buy them what they actually do how many tabs they open while they do it we need to test we need to compare the usual ux stuff heat Maps statistics qualitative quantitative we cannot be data driven without data and that comes from digging ux well apart from really stupid mistakes that happen with ignoring the context there's also opportunity to be made and that's um oh wait I forgot to tell you about the life hacks if you don't do it still when you're doing a creative brief for the agency already request a square and a vertical because it's standard and watch all of your videos without sound because that is also standard and second please don't hate on textplates textplates there are not because they're not classy and it's an easy way to you know explain stuff we can't explain visually they're there because people

don't have enough attention span to really read your visual story so don't take don't hate on them use them they actually show better results now um this is a funny funnel case everybody recognizes sales funnel yeah right uh when I launch a campaign that's what you expect there will be Impressions Impressions will turn to clicks clicks will turn to installs that was what I expected one day a year ago when I launched the campaign and in a week I came and I saw this um it was an accolades trailer and The Impressions went fine installs went great just no clicks happened and I was really puzzled like what's going on like did the installs come from somewhere else no like clearly it was that campaign so some 10 minutes research and I found my answer 96 of impressions for that campaign were shown on Smart TVs because usually

I limit the devices and here I didn't I forgot sometimes happens so those views they were cheap and the users turned out to be pretty good they couldn't generate clicks because well you don't click with a remote when you're watching Smart TV but it was actually a perfect moment for sales because when a person turns on YouTube on their Smart TV they're pretty much a pleasure moreover they're pretty much bored it was a great moment to remind them that hey you like video games huh try this one this is why the conversion was really good really good it was one of the best channels afterwards so yes do not ignore the context dqx and think how you can find you can use it in your benefit because time again the cost of the trailer is not what you do wrong it's not about mistakes it's about the opportunities that you have missed with it uh SIN number four I promise to mention

in this talk like what's expensive what mistakes are expensive this one is like this one's got an anti-award every time and it all starts with the wrong business process because let's look at this that's how your creative director sees the trailer there's a grip and start there's a build epic build up there's drum roll somewhere a culmination the trumpets play there's a mind-blowing plot twist that's for the second 40 grand finale with a pack shot that makes people immediately click wishlist and then there's how viewers Watch trailers that that curve is way less exciting is it let me just zoom in on it for a second 17 percent 17 made it past nine nine seconds and that was a Gameplay trailer it was one minute long

um and if any one of you loves this place in Google um sorry this is the Facebook one in Facebook where this curve is shown you will also know that 17 or nine plus seconds is actually not bad it's actually above average that was working really fine the thing is that the creative director never got to show the culmination and the trumpet never played for the majority of people yeah so it is a very sad and very predictable cure work hard spend most of your time on your first 10 seconds just make many versions try it with sound try it without sound and my personal favorite show it with a person with heavy ADHD and count in seconds how long it takes for them to take out their smartphone uh because those you can see their eyes fidgets immediately the moment that they lose attention those 10 seconds are

likely the only impression you're gonna make of the game so put in the effort now uh while we're at it there is of course a question like about the rest 60 seconds why don't we just make ad videos of 10 seconds always never waste the time well that's not what trailers are made for right trailers are made to make people hyped and my favorite option for this one and this is for mythcore to hardcore games mostly is Taylor everything after the 10th second to hardcore fans let's imagine that you're making a game in the famous IP uh Warhammer 40K for example there will be people who will be making popcorn and chilling the beers and inviting the friends and sitting around the TV to wait for your premiere on YouTube because it's a famous IP cater to them their word of mouth is worth gold just

cater to the hardcore ones that actually care what what happens next well um I think Marvel movies that put the juicy you know Easter egg after the credits showed us all how it's done so this is more or less the idea now um let's talk about confusing the purpose it's a pretty big one because using the purpose of the trailer why we make it so while preparing preparing for the stock I asked Chad GPT should I make a trailer for my game anyone ever ask that from generative Ai No Yeah well it was good no my sucked like it was very bad advice like very generic nothing special except for one thing one thing was smart because it reminded me that trailers help Gamers to make informed

decisions about their purchase um time again we're not making the trailer to summarize our game like it's a magnum opus that needs a movie about it purpose of the trailer is to serve the player now think about a player on your store Page right on Steam page for instance what do you want them to do um what is the desired action at this moment from you to the player yeah it's to hit that green purchase button it's not to watch the trailer the last thing you want is them to sit back like this and go like well it kind of started excited but after two minutes I'm not sure on my purchase here no the quicker they stop watching the trailer and start playing your game the better the purpose of the trailer is to serve their decision so

my cure for this is to follow the dopamine um if you at some point forget what is the purpose of this exact piece of footage or this Frame or this cutscene over here I have a universal answer for you just look at this and think that a good trailer triggers dopamine release dopamine makes people do things like click buy or click wish list or tell their friends about you um or even remember your game it all starts with the feeling of excitement with dopamine we're entertainers after all we have one job to keep people having fun to entertain them so please be efficient and communicate clearly and check every part of the trailer that you have for does it create emotional value

for my viewer is there dopamine made there are they digging it no you don't get the feeling that it's gonna be good then chop it remove it edit it out and find something better something that does excite and I have for an illustration I took stills from two store Page trailers of pretty good games and neighboring genres once ixion and you can see that there's like a farm somewhere in space and there's uh they even actually baked subtitles into the trailer to make sure that everybody is getting on board with a narrative welcome on board the ticken property of dollars aerospace engineering Corporation okay um this is Crusader Kings 3. both Stills are from somewhere in the beginning of the trailer and I just like how they illustrate the difference here of what I mean when I say like I'm

really really into the details of the trailers who can tell me why ixion is bad and Crusader Kings is good any ideas yes please humans yeah more it's a good one yeah that's one of my trip points the UI shows the management Sim part the the and the management Sim makes you go like uh I can be the boss uh one more uh yeah I'm more colorful but sorry I prefer silent yeah well it's very generic right another RTS probably and here is some story told so I'm wonder what's going on I want more and here well this is like screenshot

from the game nothing happened at least you see what you get no what do you get so you see what will happen the whole game experience like in uh Kings uh more I have only like what three seconds to look at it so would I even uh well seven seven like not three it's not that bad but uh yes please I have no idea uh maybe I'm just another type of target audience or whatever the left one looks a bit like a movie yeah it says well my personal explanation of any strong opinions oh one more yes so

it is but the next one you can see the setting and I'm sorry space cells uh yes please um I think the Crusader Kings is just there's just more things there you can see a longer time for Crusader Kings but just still just only one frame so I didn't know how it looks in the in the movie but and but the judging by only one frame I see I watch longer the frame on the right yeah because there's a lot going on oh my personal explanation for this one um and yes time again target audience Some people prefer Excision uh and that makes a lot of sense for I was talking about dopamine right so dopamine comes when people recognize their player fantasy what ixion does is they're trying to bias into their world at the stage where we know nothing about

that world we go like why are you telling me the story like why should I care um is it time to carry now like while in Crusader games they're selling the player fantasy of being a ruler of medieval England because it says England in a medieval font and that's enough to understand like hey wait huh I get to be the king oh wow look I have a queen as well I have Knights nice so all of this already creates the desire to chase the fantasy while buying into the world that you don't know that brings up quite a bit of Engagement all and maybe it's a bit too early to do it in the first 20 seconds of your trailer um so this is why I prefer stuff like this sales way better um now if we're talking about how to follow the dopamine and this is um my personal preference there is a thing called actalysis

framework it's written by a guy called yukai Chao his um more on the gamification side it's way simpler than game design so it's not gonna tax your time as much but what it is really good for is managing motivation so I also added a literally a quote from ad design that I was making for a city Builder game um they call about the coolst part about the palace is that it helps you to combine positive and negative like the sweet and the sour so it makes for a good taste in a city Builder game the positive is like I get to be a mayor I get to create everything so that everybody's happy about it the negative in many city builders is that the time is sticking so it creates urgency and when you do the sweet and the sour in your add content it together creates both the urgency and the desire so the

user feels good about being a Creator and at the same time they are urged to actually pay for the game uh so um actalysis could work out for a lot of ads I really recommend it because an easy way of understanding how to actually create that conflict of positive and negative now uh to sin number six is about poor risk management there is still risk in game trailers right say you make a trailer that looks really much for cop um Team based shooter and your game is actually a single player P well it's not gonna It's Not Gonna Fly good and what usually help happens here is that the publisher the developer everybody sits down and go like yeah life is good we've got 300K for a trailer let's make

something star-studded let's make something that they cannot cannot say no to because we can because we can afford mocap we can we can do this we can do that no it's not a good idea don't make just one for all 300K make at least two and how do we usually try to tackle the risks of making a bad trailer and the worst that our industry has come up with is this this is not a cure that poor guy there is the one-man Army who does editing animation and a voiceover with the help of AI because he has a thick accent well all of those wonderful people all the stakeholders you know the biggest trailer production I've been on had 23 official stakeholders they were ranging from assistant brand manager to vice president they spanned six departments they all

had comment and veto rate if I just took like the time all those wonderful people spent on the game and the salary that was spent on it we would have two trailers not one that's for sure and this is like at the time spent is not even the worst the worst is this and thank you for Market Tunis for explaining this problem designed by committee is that we make a compromise compromises are not creative very often not creative it just becomes very Bland and unrelatable and the Bland taste is gonna cost you way more because time again you're losing the opportunity you're losing the moment where you could generate dopamine and make people remember you get their attention so the Cure is easy and of course you can need to build trust for people who make trailers you ever thought how in

Hollywood they have separate directors producers whole Crews that make the trailers if director in Hollywood thinks that they're not good enough to make a trailer by themselves and that's a separate skill set why do we think that our lead artist or game designer is good enough trust people who make trailers know what they're doing they've they've made a few they you know give them a bit of freedom but a bit of freedom because time again the risk is to mismanage the problem is to mismatch the risks never make one trailer think at least two so build trust and plan in a safe edit uh what's a safe edit uh I had this one three months ago so we made the main edit it had a very good close-up of a male bot and a questionable voiceover choice so what we agreed on is that we make a

safe edit for the store and we were planning for it in the beginning and this is what allowed us to have the main cut and the main cut was absolutely loved by the community so who are the people what are the functions that determine what's a safe edit uh number one anyone who is responsible for public for publishing it on store anyone who monitors that uh because well steam is more or less free but if you go to meta that place is Disneyland well you have to be really really compliant with what they have second PR managers and diversity officer because if you do something socially questionable it's them who gonna pick up the phone for BBC explaining another situation and third is a legal and compliance team because if there is for instance copyright infringement question it wasn't a parody or not it's them who's gonna who are gonna face uh the problem

just a quick reminder notice that none of this has vice president of marketing CEO of the studio or the office manager only people who are actually gonna get on the Fire in case it goes south and they are the ones who are going to face the consequences just don't make your little life for your career the life of your colleagues any difficult give them a safe edit and revert to it in case the house is on fire now the final sin and the biggest one is actually despair I know it's hard to not to give up there is no Silver Bullet From making a trailer back when I was a CMO um I was sitting outside the office it was the day of the release and that time for that game like all the

stars have aligned we had the time we had the budget we had the team so I was sitting there and the creative director came to me and said boss this is the best trailer I've ever made I'm so happy we're releasing it today and I was like hmm great remember that feeling will anyone be surprised when I say that the trailer flopped it got zero interest anyone also be surprised that the server laid down and we killed the first the weekend of the game well it didn't really go well they're like graded in well what do you do when there's zero interest well you stand up you dust your knees you fix your makeup you do a postmortem meeting and then you go and try again because we create an entertainment and show must go on maybe one day we'll get this it's nice feeling to have

it's a nice feeling to have but until then we are Gamers so we don't give up when we die we stand up and we make one more trailer until it works thank you [Applause]