My name is Buddy Sola and I’m the Community Manager for Akupara Games. In today’s Indie Insights, I want to share with everyone an insanely useful resource we put together this year.
Earlier this year, we launched The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, and Stadia (on top of all of the expected PC storefronts.) And the #1 thing we learned in our marketing post-mortem of that project is that trailers can be a massive pain in the keister. Not from a creative point of view, in fact, I’d say that our trailers for Darkside really knocked it out of the park (you can see the launch trailer below.) I’m talking about setting up those beautiful trailers for partnership with Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Xbox. Obviously, five platforms is quite a lot to launch onto under any circumstances, but navigating the ins and outs of what trailers go where with what alterations and what specifications can be a nightmare especially as you’re walking up to launch.
Thankfully, Derek Lieu has everything you need to get it right the first time. He recently updated the content at gametrailerspecs.com so if you need a guidepost for any of your trailers that you’re submitting to partners, he’d be my first stop.
And following Derek’s lead, we’re publishing our in-house trailer specs checklist that we use to make sure all of our trailers have every detail correct. Derek’s specs actually really helped us iron out the checklist which is why I want to give him so much credit here. If you’re working trailers, you can feel free to download the checklist from the link above and apply it to your own titles moving forward.
Between Derek’s specifications and our checklist, my hope is that you’ll avoid the late night video editing that I was doing trying to get everything correct to submit to Nintendo, Sony and Stadia all at once.
If you have any questions, I have cut so many of these trailers that I know these specs like the back of my hand and I would be more than happy to chat with you in the Akupara Games Discord. We have a channel called #industry-advice built just for this so feel free to start a discussion there!