Make the Trailer Before the Game: A Marketing First Way to Prototype

Рет қаралды 15,816

GDC 2025

Күн бұрын

Пікірлер: 92

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

This is my talk, so if anyone has a question please ask away!

@sarerusoldone 4 ай бұрын

absolutely loved it! i don't have any questions, but i hope your other talk gets uploaded as well :D

@ulysses1685 4 ай бұрын

Mask? Really? 😅

@sarerusoldone 4 ай бұрын

@@ulysses1685 why would that matter?

@casinomann 4 ай бұрын

I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?

@KindSparkdev 4 ай бұрын

Will your marketing timeline talk also be published?

@musicmikemn 4 ай бұрын

It seems as though the key point is to have a coherent, well-communicated vision for the whole team to rally around. Creating a trailer forces you to articulate what your key pillars are and where the fun is. These are things that should rightly be in your bible but having a video format is a great way to encapsulate it without reading many pages of documentation.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

You got it 👍🏼

@PoorLittleRobots 4 ай бұрын

Reminds me of "sell it in a gif". I remade my game to show better in short video clips and trailers and it ended up being much more fun and enjoyable throughout the whole game. Basically give everything a animation, effect, and sound and the game comes alive.

@Lyoishi 4 ай бұрын

Good talk and ideas to consider. The half true title is going to cause a lot of comment engagement. For people who got clickbaited: It's about 2 things, "Imagining" or designing a trailer to guide development towards certain goals; and creating a very marketable game/ideas by thinking about how people will react to your ideas with only a few seconds of exposure. It is extremely useful, but an actual video trailer is probably not something ethical to use once you enter pre ordering/Kickstarting stage without VERY clear labeling.

@sebastiana2035 4 ай бұрын

Okay, so it sounds like the MVP strategy with a clickbait title?

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

@@sebastiana2035MVP is one way to do it, but it’s not necessarily a good method because an MVP might still not have enough to make a trailer (even just on paper) I go over multiple methods in the talk! I didn’t never thought the title was clickbaity. I think it’s pretty literally what the talk is about 😅

@Naiifou 4 ай бұрын

I don't see the clickbait in the title, it is in it that this is about prototyping. This approach helps tremendously to only focus on the core of your game and make sure it's as good/fun as it can be, and only then to the rest to have a complete game.

@sebastiana2035 4 ай бұрын

@@Naiifou They changed the title

@llareia 4 ай бұрын

Thanks Derek for this great talk. This question has been my #1 marketing question for quite some time now, as the importance of trailers for Steam pages can't be overstated, and you're supposed to launch a Steam page early to maximize discoverability...but the question has always been "But then how do I make a trailer if I don't have a game??" So glad to see someone address this. The multiple approaches you give are very helpful for different team sizes, skill levels, and % project completion.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful! Also, to be clear, I'm not saying this trailer should be the one you use as an announce trailer (though it certainly can be if you know what you're doing)

@llareia 4 ай бұрын

@@DerekLieu Thank you for the response. Even if it's not an announce trailer, it certainly helps to give an idea of what will eventually go in the announce trailer, and where to focus early game development. So it's still helpful information!

@alexevaldez 4 ай бұрын

Big GDC talk fan here. And this for sure is one of my fave videos ever. I've been doing these techniques for a decade now, and this talk just builds upon what I do. I highly recommend these techniques.

@AlanTwoRings 4 ай бұрын

Fake it before you make it?

@yanhu 4 ай бұрын

At least you can imagine in your mind before you make it, what the funny moment in the game to sell your game to players.

@clixx13 4 ай бұрын

Kind of a cynical and cheeky way of framing it, but kind of, yeah. If you make a trailer first and people like the trailer, then you know exactly what game you're making. If you make the game first and then people don't like the trailer, you have to hope you just have a bad trailer and not a bad game.

@leezhieng 4 ай бұрын

That's why there are so many shity games in the market including AAA titles which don't fit what their trailers promised.

@MrTeteX9 4 ай бұрын

This is what i done for my i'm making. I'm reassured that was a good idea thanks to your talk. In fact, it's very powerful to pitch the game in a few lines, and then say "The trailer is online if you want" 100% time, people look at it with me and they understand much faster how the game look, and how it works without my long explanation. And when i go in salon and conference, i can easily see if people are exited by the game, even if i don't have a playable version. I will see in the long term if the approach was worth it, but that the way we choose, and for now, it work great !

@mandisaw 4 ай бұрын

Great talk - appreciated the pros/cons of various approaches 👍 Couple add'l points for the "spotting challenges" aspect are localization & accessibility. I've started explicitly watching some non-English trailers raw, to see how well (or poorly) the devs convey the game's hooks to someone not fluent in the language. Similar deal with watching trailers for games in unfamiliar genres - can I grok the "verbs" and maybe the basic appeal, even if I'm not steeped in that genre's visual language. Since our games are global these days, and players are coming from different skill/familiarity levels, it's been illuminating to step into the POV of "I don't know wtf this is", which of course is how most players will view my trailer 😅

@boukew 4 ай бұрын

Makes you wonder when the game actually starts, when you press play or once you see it?

@prancinNOOB 4 ай бұрын

Hell yeah, the Kickstarter MMO strategy Edit: What do you mean "What do I put in my trailer?" You put gameplay.

@iglassica 4 ай бұрын

Yeah

@jonathanvoshell7914 4 ай бұрын

Anthem is not a blueprint for the game industry to follow.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

I never said in the talk that this is to make a trailer that you then release, it's for figuring out the game's concept before deep in production.

@Epuxstudios 4 ай бұрын

Climatic scene that changes in just 45 seconds best trailers

@shanegleeson7271 4 ай бұрын

The cyberpunk approach?

@dXXPacmanXXb 4 ай бұрын

I hate that games need viral marketing to succeed. You cant just make a good game anymore. It must be marketable with a 5 second clip.

@sarerusoldone 4 ай бұрын

just making a good game and ignoring marketing was NEVER a viable way to make a living off making games lol nobody said you have to go viral, but with the tons of games uploaded to steam every day, nobody's gonna check out yours if you don't put a little bit of effort into advertising it

@dXXPacmanXXb 4 ай бұрын

@@sarerusoldone It was enough back in the day

@mandisaw 4 ай бұрын

@@dXXPacmanXXbNo, back in the day you just had box art. Assuming you paid the retail chain's "fees" for a cover-out shelf placement. And before that, you had some cabinet art in a trade magazine, to sell to arcade owners. Games have been a product for 5 decades, and they've needed marketing the whole time. If anything, the ability to make & market a game has been democratized - this is a free video, dropping info that you used to have to pay some company thousands of dollars for.

@ShinsukeMoriya 4 ай бұрын

no.

@flamingburitto 4 ай бұрын

This doesn't sound like a good approach... But let's see.

@TheMechanicalCoder32 4 ай бұрын

It's a great approach. Start with what you can sell, and work to make it viable. 3D AmongUs took this approach and it worked perfectly. You know what an awful approach is? Focusing solely on mechanics and getting lost in the sauce without focusing on marketing. The trailer is the keystone of a game. Having the trailer as an afterthought is a great way to make an unmarketable game.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

The easiest method I describe is incredibly easy to do with very little time investment. So if after trying it you decide this is isn’t for you then that’s ok and you didn’t waste much time 😊

@flamingburitto 4 ай бұрын

@@DerekLieu that's fair. I can't make a strong judgement on it without actually trying it first.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

@@flamingburitto Makes sense! I of course recommend you try 😄

@handsoaphandsoap Ай бұрын

Just depends on the aims of your project. If your goal is to make a game that will sell then this is a great method. If your goal is to just make a game and not care about how much you make from it or how many people play it then this method is irrelevant to you.

@CarlDylan-m2h 2 ай бұрын

Keebler Plains

@KathleenGiles-s6o 2 ай бұрын

Garcia Patricia Lewis James Allen Cynthia

@Retr0gam1ngR0cks 4 ай бұрын

I just watched the whole video, and with due my respect, I disagree a lot with what is presented here. Also another meme-based presentation in 2024…jeezzz It seems like you push developers to put something out before the game is in good shape. As gamer, I want to see CONTENT! Where am I going to spend my next 50-200 hours? Unless the game is basically finished, this should only be used for internal motivation of the team, not as a marketing content. Reviews > game trailer. If the game is not good, it won’t sell, no matter how pretty those CGI videos are.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

This talk isn’t about making a trailer that then gets uploaded. It’s about making a trailer or just thinking of a trailer as a means to strengthen the game idea and game production. Also, this talk was made for indies, not AAA devs (but some of these brain storm ideas do come from AAA)

@Retr0gam1ngR0cks 4 ай бұрын

@@DerekLieu that changes the context a lot! Thanks for answering

@XnndjehdhkNxndjhds 3 ай бұрын

Young Maria Clark Daniel Walker Carol

@---nu4ed 4 ай бұрын

A guy whose career is making trailers telling us trailers are very important? I can't wait until Steam allows A/B testing so we can finally see really how (un)important trailers and capsule art are.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

Trailers are needed in more places than just the Steam page! Also, said in the talk that of COURSE I’D tell people trailers are important, lol 🤪 Valve also literally has a section about how important a trailer is in their Steamworks Development Steam page best practices video. So listen to them if you don’t trust me 🤷🏻‍♂️

@---nu4ed 4 ай бұрын

@@DerekLieu Ok, but Apple and Google also say trailers are important, and yet my A/B store page experiments show trailers for my games (I have four, each over 500k downloads) are mostly irrelevant for conversion rates. So absent any other data, I'm overall skeptical about the importance of trailers. Last 3 games I bought on Steam, I didn't even watch the trailers, just the screenshots, but that's anecdotal. Do you, as an expert in the matter, have any hard data on how important trailers are? Specifically the difference between good or bad trailers in terms of conversion rates and how many Steam users actually watch the trailer before buying (and do they watch the entire trailers, etc).

@PoorLittleRobots 4 ай бұрын

@@---nu4edI'm going for a trailer so good it can sell my game no matter where I post it, social media or a store page. If your trailer can't do that, maybe your game needs more marketable aspects included that can better communicate why your game is great. If nothing else, game feel and juice just seems like communicating what the game is doing to the player and their responses, and when you do that well you get a game you can just show. Good game core + communication = first step of sales pipeline. Also sync to music beats for easy wins.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

@@---nu4ed Developers do receive wishlists after the release of trailers (and a percentage of those then buy the game), but this is just one way trailers fit into a game’s marketing. In this day a lot of people make decisions after seeing raw gameplay from content creators, streamers, influencers, and press. Those people all receive hundreds if not thousands of requests for coverage, so a good trailer is essential to sum up the game for these people who are very busy. Basically, trailers are importantly so long as there are people who have finite time and need to learn about a lot of games. But also, trailers can receive tens or hundreds of thousands of views across social media channels (and provide b-roll for content creators) so there are so many ways they’re beneficial in ways other than directly leading to downloads or purchase. Also, you said 500k downloads so am I correct in assuming your games are free to download? If so, your purchase funnel is very different since the download is free whereas Steam games are premium.

@DerekLieu 4 ай бұрын

And my friend Chris Zukowski has written a lot about capsule art on his blog how to market a game. Developers sent him results showing a big change in store traffic after changing their capsule art. Good key art and capsule can make a huge difference!