If you take a look at any mainstream AAA release, like the recently released Total War: Warhammer III, you’ll see dozens of videos from trailers to unit profiles to mechanics overviews. While indie games can’t replicate all of those videos without a AAA budget and staff, we can take the hint: videos can be more than just trailers and there’s value in creating video content for your game’s marketing outside of traditional trailers.
Welcome to the Diving Deep series, a short series of blogs breaking down one way to approach video content for the release of your indie game. As Community Manager for Akupara Games, I’ve been producing video content as part of our marketing campaigns for years. Today, I want to keep it high level and talk about the different kinds of video content that can be used in marketing your indie game.
What is and isn’t a trailer?
When trailers originally debuted on movies in the 50’s, they actually came after the feature presentation. Because they trailed the feature, they were called trailers! The term has almost completely flipped its meaning in the intervening seven decades.
The first thing any player sees when they drop into your Steam page is going to be the game’s trailer. And many, many blogs out there are going to stress the importance of your game’s trailers. This blog series isn’t going to be one of them. While I’m very interested in breaking down how I approach video content for our game launches, the kind of insight I’m going to be providing is specifically for content that isn’t a traditional trailer for your game. To that end, I want to set some boundaries for what a trailer is and isn’t.
Reveal Trailer
At Akupara, you’ll see that for most of our game launches we have three trailers. First, we have a reveal trailer. This trailer announces that we’re publishing a title, typically coinciding with the Steam store page for the game going live or being overhauled with updated assets and copy. The reveal trailer is almost always repurposed from demo footage that the developer used to sell us on the game in the first place, so it’s core focus is on the gameplay loop of the game. Reveal trailers make particularly good trailers for your Steam store page for this reason; players want to see gameplay from a trailer as soon as they open your Steam page.
Announcement Trailer
Second, we have the announcement trailer. This is a much more important piece of the marketing campaign because its endslate is going to have a release date on it. For fans that have wishlisted, joined your Discord, replied to your tweets and gotten pumped for your game, the most important trailer they will see is the announcement trailer. It’s the video that will kick them into high gear, crystallizing their hype into something you can harness for your game’s launch.
Launch Trailer
Third, we have the launch trailer. This trailer accompanies the game’s launch and will typically be the biggest, most explosive asset you ever put out about your game. It will be the asset featured in your launch day tweets that everyone shares and likes. It will be the asset that gets the most views on your Youtube. It will be the asset that every press outlet embeds in their coverage of your title. Your launch trailer is the massive net cast out over the internet, hoping to draw players to your store pages and convince them to purchase your title.
All three of these trailers will probably feature rapid cutting, high-energy music, rapidly cut montages of gameplay and a bit of copy explaining the game’s basic tenets. It’s a deckbuilding roguelite– with a twist! It’s an adventure game– solve the mystery! It’s a rip-roaring comedy– jokes! It’s this focus on an evocative piece of content that defines what is a trailer. It wants to create a mood or a feeling in the player. It wants to inform them on the game’s tone. Players will interact well with this kind of content, to be sure, but almost everything above is going to be flipped on its head for what I’d like to lay out, in what will be the deep dive video.
The Deep Dive Video
Where a trailer is fast and frantic, a deep dive will be slow and straightforward. Where a trailer wants to evoke the feeling of playing the game, a deep dive wants to explain everything that’s happening on screen. While a trailer’s music is powerful, energetic and high-tempo, a deep dive wants something low key that fades into the background.
Maybe the best modern version of the split between a trailer and a deep dive comes from League of Legends. Everytime a champion releases in League, you can expect two things. First, there will be a trailer to communicate the feeling of a new champion releasing. Then, there will be a champion spotlight that comes out and explains that champion’s mechanics to the players. In this analogy, the champion spotlight is the deep dive video.
The power of trailers is undeniable but how many times have you heard gamer friends of yours say: “Well, the trailer looks good but I’m not sold by the gameplay.” The antidote to that poison is the deep dive. It allows you to put your money where your mouth is and explain that your game isn’t just an evocative experience but a carefully crafted and well-designed product.
In this way, the deep dive video tends to focus on the form and function of gameplay mechanics. While it’s certainly possible to make a video about the game’s art, writing or music, most deep dive videos will break down the core mechanics of your game. In this way, the priority of the deep dive is legibility. You want to be clear, concise and conversational. Something that a player with very little experience with trailers, a demo or your store page will still find intuitive and straightforward to understand.
In Conclusion
This series is going to focus on making deep dive videos. As Community Manager, I handle the entire process of creating multiple deep dive videos from beginning to end. When it comes to concepting what the deep dive is going to focus on, what the copy of the YouTube text is, what the release schedule is, and of course writing, recording and editing the video together, all of that falls squarely on my shoulders. Which should give you a little bit of a guess as to how much work is going to go into these videos.
Next week, I wanna to focus on how I start making Deep Dive videos by outlining concepts, writing scripts and recording voiceover. From there, I’ll get into the weeds on recording footage, editing and scheduling videos for release with your campaign!
If you have any questions or comments about this blog, please feel free to come chat with me on the Akupara Games Discord! You can also see some of the videos I’ve cut for our YouTube channel here. Thanks for reading!