How Bad Trailers Make Games Look Worse Than They Are

This trailer has over 175,000 views on this version alone and lots of very positive comments from people who sound very interested in playing the game. There are some comments here and there which say the graphics don't look super good, but most comments are extremely positive. This is a very typical game trailer which is extremely functional, but whose form is incredibly dry.

The title cards alone show they didn't spend a lot of time making the trailer look good. The majority of the graphics are plain white text oddly positioned out of the way in the top right of the screen. There are even times where the title card spans multiple shots, and the Game HUD/UI obscures it. In a TikTok video I recorded about this trailer, one person even said they didn't realize there were any title cards until I pointed them out.

The thing this trailer does best is to just say “Open World Life Simulator” from the start. Everything else is pretty dry.

The music is also very forgettable. It sounds like it's either in-game music designed to loop forever, or cheap royalty free music. There's no identity to this music and it doesn't look like the music was considered at all by the editor. I can tell because even in music this forgettable, there are peaks and valleys which are great opportunities to make cuts and actions extra dramatic. But in this trailer, those moments aren't taken advantage of; they frequently happen in the middle of shots to absolutely no fanfare.

The full HUD/UI is on screen for nearly the entire trailer, which tells me the person capturing wasn't going through the necessary steps to make the presentation look as good. Either that, or someone decided the HUD should be on for most of the trailer. Based off the lack of consideration in just about everything else in the trailer, it feels more likely the editor received a huge chunk of raw gameplay they had to cut together, and there was no recapturing to make the footage look optimal.

The direction of this trailer is incredibly underwhelming. This is like an iPhone commercial which is reading off technical specifications. Yes, we'll be able to understand what makes this new iPhone better because we know what came before, but I doubt this trailer elicited an emotional reaction in the audience through its direction and editing. This is not a trailer designed to make you feel things; it's designed to convey the bullet points of the game in the most raw and clinical way possible.

But does any of this matter if the reception was good?

To some degree, it doesn't really matter, because the reception seems to be positive. That said, this sort of trailer always feels like a huge misstep. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars making a game, and then put out such a lackluster trailer? If this were a pretty low budget game, the expectation wouldn't be so high, but it feels off when a trailer's production value doesn't match the game's.

I think trailers can be subtle indicators of the quality of a game; a low budget trailer can make a high budget game look worse than it should. Now, of course not everyone has the critical eye for trailer editing that professionals do. In fact, I think a lot of game trailers can look more "high budget" by keeping things very simple with a good music cue and footage cut to it with no title cards. As soon as you start adding things like voiceover and title cards, the production value can plummet.

Most of the things shown with title cards could’ve been understood without having it spelled out. This one about building a town is actually pretty good, but its presentation is just so boring.

I think this trailer wouldn't look nearly as cheap if it didn't have any title cards at all. Think of it this way: Imagine two research papers submitted to a college professor. One has no title, and the other has a title sloppily handwritten in crayon. In game trailer making, the reason less is often more is because the less visible the hand of the trailer maker, the more space there is for the audience to fill in the blanks.

If you show a bunch of footage from a very typical looking pixel platformer game, that will look and sound much more interesting than if you added the words: "Run, jump, climb, shoot, and play tons of levels, in this super fun game!" The version with all the words tells you to focus on the mundane and rote things (and tries to excite you by saying the game is fun). But without the guidance, your brain's interpretation can focus on the things it finds interesting.

If someone served you a delicious looking plate of pork fried rice, you'll probably just enjoy eating it. But you might be put off if they served it and said: "You'll love this pork fried rice, the rice was bought at a supermarket, the meat came from a pig, the eggs were packed in a styrofoam container, and it was made in a wok using vegetable oil." Why are you pointing out all of these things? Now I think this pork fried rice is kind of suspicious. The strength of showing off a game in a well cut trailer is teasing the audience, and welcoming them in to draw their own conclusions.

They saved the content montage for last, but instead of showing content, they just run through more bullet points over a debug camera shot. Not very interesting, and again, just using the trailer to show a list of features.

I think the reason this trailer succeeded was in spite of its trailer, not because of its trailer. This is not a well saturated genre of game; The Sims is its only competition. This is almost like Stardew Valley coming out years after no new Harvest Moongames. This is why everything is exciting even when presented in this very dry trailer. Paradox did something similar before with Cities Skylines, because there weren't other city builder games of similar scope. If this genre was more well worn, this presentation would really be doing this game a disservice. The less unique the game, the more important it is for the presentation to be top notch.

I don't just say this because I think professional game trailer editors should be hired for more projects, but because games are SO much work and SO expensive to make. It feels almost disrespectful to put together a half-assed trailer to represent those years of work. How much this actually matters as far as selling the game and building a strong brand, depends on how hooky and unique the game is. The more hooky, the more people are ok seeing through a badly made trailer. The less hooky, the more a bad trailer can bring down the whole production.

Every game deserves a good trailer!

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