When to Hire a Trailer Editor
If you have a limited budget to hire a professional game trailer maker (or even an amateur one), it's best to spend your money on the trailers which will be the most difficult for you to make and are most worth the investment. I’ve worked on nearly all varieties so I know which types of trailers I find most difficult to make, and ones where I think to myself: "The developers probably could've just made this themselves."
At a certain level of production size and experience, it benefits the developers to do little to no video work at all (especially if they don't have video editing experience). It doesn't make a lot of sense to pay a programmer with 15 years of experience to work as a video editor with little to no experience; that's essentially what happens when people focused on making the core game become trailer makers. You're losing out on their primary skillset, putting them on a project they're not as good at (and will likely take them longer to do) and probably getting a lesser result. All in all, not the best use of your money even if what you're spending is time, not money from a bank account.
But not all games have the budget to hire someone to make all their marketing videos, either because they're a solo developer or small team with low overhead costs (and they're flexible on time). You could argue time and money are basically the same thing as far as a business is concerned, but that is a topic beyond the scope of this newsletter :P
The point is, a lot of developers will usually do some amount of trailer and video work, so here are my tips for what trailers it makes most sense to hire for and why.
Announce trailer
The announce trailer is an incredibly important milestone for any game. The biggest problem in making one is when there’s little to no game from which to capture footage. Very little game means less for a game trailer editor to get their hands on. If the game is only finished enough to capture a small handful of shots, it makes the project that much easier to wrap your head around, and therefore a bit more manageable for the dev team to make a trailer (but that certainly doesn't mean there's NO benefit to hiring an editor).
I would at the very least, consult with a trailer editor (shameless self plug for my consulting) to check the trailer's direction, story structure, pacing, shot selection, sound design, and other small little polish bits. It also sometimes makes sense to hire an editor just to tighten up the trailer's editing, which could cost less than hiring someone to do full trailer production. Several small tweaks to the editing can make a huge difference. For example, this is essentially what I did for the Absolverreveal trailer.
Since announce trailers for a lot of games can be more minimalist, I've seen lots of developers make very good and successful announce trailers without any hired help. If there is no significant build of the game, it's also common for the announce trailer to be mostly made in-engine. So unless you’re working with a trailer editor who can work in-engine, there will be fewer opportunities for them to work hands on.
The biggest benefit to working with a trailer editor at this stage is to construct the story and figure out what shots need to be captured or created so that you can dedicate resources to those specific things, and then have them do some final checks and tweaking during production.
When I made this reveal trailer I made for The Forgotten City, these were pretty much the only functioning systems in the build.
Gameplay & Story Trailers
These trailers benefit most from a trailer editor because presumably at this stage of development there’s more game to play and capture. This makes it a MUCH bigger task to distill the contents to a 60-90 second trailer, and therefore it's more beneficial to hire help. This especially goes for story trailers for games with hundreds or thousands of lines of dialogue. Finding the story within that dialogue is a unique discipline even amongst video editors.
If your game is the sort where the hooks aren’t terribly unique and it has many similarities between other games in the genre, your announce trailer will likely be a gameplay trailer. A less unique game means you’ll have to show more to get people interested.
Think of it this way: a new ice cream shop which just makes good ice cream but has no unique presentation or recipe has to do more work than a new shop which makes their ice cream with liquid nitrogen. A completely novel place like a restaurant where every dish looks like a cat has to do less work to stand out than a restaurant that serves diner food like hamburgers and french fries.
If you hire a trailer editor for only one trailer, I think it makes the most sense to hire them to make the gameplay trailer (especially if it's the front of your store pages).
By the time Spelunky 2 was ready for its first gameplay trailer, there was A LOT of game from which to pull footage. Pretty much infinite possibilities O_O
Dev commentary, vlogs, overviews, 101
These trailers which explain the game in great detail tend to be more “raw” in their presentation. This is why I think these benefit the least from working with a trailer editor. Pacing, rhythm, framing, and composition don’t matter quite as much because for a lot of these videos, the narration explaining the game is the main content and the video is supplementary material.
Of course, a trailer editor can help you focus the video by removing redundant or less interesting bit, make the video more punchy, and generally smoother to watch. But, these videos are generally targeted towards the more hardcore audience who wants in-depth videos and are likely to have higher attention spans. Also, these videos often receive fewer views due to their specificity. For all of these reasons I think your money is better spent on the other types of trailers (unless you’re having difficulty refining the talking points and just don’t have time for capture and editing).
This great dev commentary trailer was made by the developer with Pop Agenda!
Launch trailer
The launch trailer is very important and worth hiring a trailer editor for just like with gameplay and story trailers. This is often the main trailer in digital storefronts which means it’s potentially the face of the game for the rest of its life. So it’s really really important that this one be the best it can be.
But if the earlier gameplay trailer will suffice as the “main” trailer I’ve also seen launch trailers which were very short or became an accolades trailer. If you go by YouTube stats, the launch trailer often receives the smallest number of views. That said, no matter what route you take for the launch trailer, you want to put your best foot forward to get people excited to finally play your game, and a not-so-great trailer at launch can feel like a false start.
This is the 1.0 launch trailer I made for Noita, which is the first trailer on the Steam page!
Let me sum this up by saying games with weaker hooks need more help to look good in a trailer. The less striking the art, the more it will take to look good and interesting. For example, Untitled Goose Game has a fantastic hook and a unique art style. The first video was several minutes of the game being played by the devs, and that was enough to make it go viral. SUPERHOT also has great art direction, and a game mechanic novel enough that when it's spelled out, everything else clicks and looks cool.
By contrast, there are lots of games with pixel art style which are platformers, metroidvanias, action adventures and are either iterating on the same combination of classic games and inspirations or slightly different from each other. These sorts of of games have a long list of features they need to tick in order to fulfill the expectations of a game in that space. These are the ice cream shops without a unique recipe or preparation style. If done poorly, these games could easily make a trailer which didn't highlight any of its differentiators at all.
Even at the AAA level of production value, first person shooter games set in the modern world with realistic guns, and post-apocalyptic settings with lots of of rubble can look incredibly similar at a glance (or a very long look). These games have to solve the same problems as the pixel art indie games, and thus would benefit from experienced trailer makers who can draw out the distinguishing factors.
Quick, name this first person shooter!
Another reason AAA games need trailer editors is because people expect high quality trailers once games reach that size and scope. Poorly made trailers for a AAA game would be like releasing with box art made from stock images, and a logo made with the Comic Sans font. Or if you went to a Michelin star restaurant and they served you with plastic utensils and paper plates.
I’ll end this by saying the benefit of hiring a trailer editor goes behind their hands on capture and editing. Simply having a fresh and unbiased set of eyes is hugely valuable to know what is and isn’t cool about your game. That means the trailer will focus more on the former and less on the latter, and that is pretty much what trailer editing is all about!
