How to Get People to See Your Trailer
I did a YouTube video collab with game developer Jonas Tyroller, who made a trailer for his upcoming game Will You Snail in just TWO days O_O.
This is a video where he documented his process, and I critiqued his final trailer!
What is the key to getting people to actually see your game trailer? Unfortunately, the answer isn't just to make a good game trailer (I wish it were!) While a well made trailer will certainly make it much easier for a trailer to spread. Because even though a trailer is itself marketing, the trailer itself sort of has to be marketed. I discussed this a bit with my friend Dana Trebella in this post about when to launch a game trailer, but let's look at all the various ways to get your trailer in front of people's eyeballs.
The ways a trailer will be seen falls into three categories which I learned about via Chris Zukowski's blog post about going viral:
Owned Media
Earned Media
Paid Media
There's some redundancy here, so read on for clarification
Owned Media
Owned Media describes all the things you own and control. This includes things like your mailing list, social media accounts, and other places you post things. If you want to send a trailer to your mailing list subscribers, you can do that! If you want to post your trailer onto Twitter, YouTube, Discord or others, you can do so whenever you want. And of course, if you have a Steam Store page, you're required to have a trailer.
The good thing about Owned Media is it's all within your power (unless for some reason you violate terms of service, in which case the platform is within their right to remove your content) and you don't have to rely on anyone to post. Assuming you have something of a following, you can expect a corresponding percentage of your followers to see your trailer when you post it (what percentage see it depends on each platform, too!) The downside is if you don't have a large following, it's far less likely people will ever see any of what you post (more on this in a bit).
These are all excellent trailers posted on the YouTube channels of the developers, but in the grand scheme of things, these view counts are pretty low.
(btw, this is a slide from my upcoming virtual GDC talk with Dana Trebella "If You Build it They Won't Come: Marketing Fallacies and Missed Opportunities"
Earned Media
This heavily works together with Owned Media, and basically means when you post something, someone enjoys it and does something like repost it, like it, make a video about it, write an article, send it to their friend, etc. You've earned that repost, share, retweet, YouTube video, etc. For example, at the top of this article I shared Chris Zukowski's post about this topic; this article is now media that Chris earned by making a helpful blog post!
Similarly, the trailer I posted up top by Jonas is somewhere between Owned and Earned Media. Had I decided not to post the video on my channel (Earned Media), it would've gone up on his own (Owned Media). Collaborations are kind of a hybrid of Owned and Paid, because you have agency over them, but they also rely on the relationships you form.
The quality of the trailer and the strength of the game's hooks and message will be what help you earn media attention. If the hooks aren't very unique, striking, memorable, or interesting, it's far less likely the trailer will spread. Earned Media is probably the most effective at spreading something, because it's word of mouth. People will almost always be more interested in a friend's recommendation than the word of the person selling it directly.
I think Earned Media is by far the category that encompasses the widest number of possible ways for a trailer to get seen. When you post on your social media accounts? Every like and retweet is earned, and gives the trailer a higher chance of being discovered. For example, a retweet shows it to that person's followers, a tweet liked by people you follow might also show up on your feed.
This is the YouTube analytics graph for the video I posted up top. Had Jonas not posted about it to his own followers, the trajectory of views would've been MUCH lower. Now imagine the same thing happening for a trailer getting posted on your channels.
I don't know the specifics of each social media platform's algorithm, but in general, the more engagement a post receives, the more likely it is those social media platforms will boost it, because the algorithm says: "People are already enjoying this video, it must be good, if I give it a bump, then it's likely even more people will watch it!"
There are ways to make your individual posts more attractive like: catchy and enticing text in your tweet, an animated GIF, a good thumbnail for YouTube, but at a certain point there's only so much you can optimize for each platform, and raw numbers are a bigger factor.
The other ways you can potentially earn media are:
Press outreach
Platform channels
Events
There are big and small events centered around showing new trailers, and the can be HUGE opportunities to get your trailer seen. If you're fortunate enough to get in one of these shows ALWAYS HAVE A CALL TO ACTION
I don't know too much about Press outreach, but as far as I know it's essentially writing emails to press and influencers with a quick and catchy pitch about your game with a trailer included. If they like what they see and think it will make an interesting story, then there's a good chance they'll write about it (for tips about writing emails to press, read this article by Victoria Tran) For higher profile indie games sometimes giving an exclusive to a publication can make things more enticing.
I don't know how big of an impact written articles make on trailer visibility, but I know that trailers featured on YouTube channels of sites with several million subscribers like Gamespot and especially IGN can translate into MUCH bigger numbers than posting on your own YouTube channel.
Platform channels
If your game is releasing on one of the major console platforms like Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, getting your game's trailer onto their YouTube channels is also a way to get it in front of lots and lots of people. If you have an exclusivity release deal with one of them, make sure to ask your contact for possible opportunities to get featured on places like their blogs, social media, and livestream events like PlayStation's State of Play, Nintendo's Direct shows and Xbox's ID@Xbox shows!
Livestream Events
There are so many livestream event shows every year, especially since the pandemic hit. These are fantastic opportunities to get your game in front of people, especially if your game fits the niche of a particular show. For example, Wholesome Games has their Wholesome Direct show which features lots of new upcoming cozy games. You can submit your game to these festivals and potentially get your trailer seen by a lot of people! Not only during the livestreams, but further promotion through those channels.
The exact same trailer I made for Spelunky received nearly 100,000 views on the Nintendo YouTube channel with 8.4 million subscribers. And almost 8,000 views on Derek Yu's YouTube channel with 4,400 subscribers.
Paid Media
Just like it sounds, Paid Media is when you spend money to boost your trailer by purchasing ads. This could come in the form of Facebook ads, reddit ads, YouTube ads, Twitter ads, and sponsored content made by influencers on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, etc. The upside is you can guarantee a certain number of views because you're paying for them, but the quality of those views will likely be lower because people don't like watching ads, and/or they're less likely to be influenced when they know something is an ad as opposed to something showing up because someone genuinely liked it and decided to talk about it.
Final Thoughts
The biggest problem with getting a game trailer to be seen is there are very few opportunities for organic discovery. That is, there aren't many avenues where your trailer might randomly be seen from someone browsing a site. In most cases, it will only show up if someone does an explicit search for it on a site like YouTube. And on social media platforms like Twitter, once you're not looking at your timeline when it gets posted (and it's stopped being retweeted) they're basically never to be seen again unless they get reposted later by someone re-discovering it.
Most of the time, trailers are a flash-in-the-pan. It gets posted when it's new and fresh, it hopefully gets seen by a lot of people in that moment and spreads via resposting on channels, reaction videos, articles, retweets, shares, etc. and then it's essentially done with unless in the future it gets linked in articles and videos about the game.
The only places I can think of where trailers might be organically discovered are on digital storefronts like Steam which have things like the discovery queue which shows you a selection of games Steam thinks you might like based on your purchasing history. Though, according to Chris Zukowski's study of Steam browsing habits, people don't really prioritize trailer watching when perusing a store page.
End result of my video collab with Jonas. The very light curved grey line at the bottom of the graph represents the number of views my videos typically get (which the video was on trend to follow exactly). Now imagine how many more boosts your trailer could get through diversified means of promotion O_O
But it's not all doom and gloom. As long as a game is in conversations or discoverable through other means, people are likely to seek out a trailer to learn more about it. Trailers are a really handy tool when you want to recommend a game. Sure, some people might go straight for an in-depth "let's play" video, but trailers will almost always be the most concise way of getting a summation of a game.
Again, only a very VERY small percentage of game trailers will go viral after getting posted only on a developer's owned media. So most of you will have to do as much as you can to find more ways to get your trailer seen by as many people as possible!
