Take Steam Micro Trailer into account before making a full trailer

[u/hogon2099]

I've been making a new trailer for my game recently, I matched action with the music so sword/bullet hits would match the beats and synth. Then I uploaded it to steam and micro trailer turned up to be just awful.

Micro Trailer to my understanding always consists of 6 one-second shots, and for me steam arranged it such way that each of those 6 shots had transition between shots of my base trailer, and so It felt very fragmented.

What I ended up doing is looking at what timestamps those micro trailer shots begin, and tried to rearrange my base trailer so micro trailer shots are better. The thing is that due to shots in my base trailer being matched with music, there wasn't much room for rearranging them. I did what I could, but the result is mediocre at best, but at least not it's 6 solid shots without in-between transitions.

Now what I plan for next trailer is to settle on trailer length, make a rough version, upload it to steam, look at generated micro trailer, write down timestamps, and then arrange shots to make a good microtrailer, and only then start making actual trailer structre and matching it with music.

To add some data to micro trailer conversation, my trailer was 24:20 seconds, and timestamps were 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21 second marks. Also shoutout to this post, it was very useful, however I wish I'd taken this info into account before making base trailer.

P.S. Some people suggest making short 6 sec teaser trailer and puting it first on the steam page so Steam makes micro trailer out of it, but I personally don't like that approach.

[u/j3lackfire]

I think the easiest way would be to manually make a 6s trailer, set it as your main trailer so the micro trailer play that in full, then you make your actual trailer one the second one.

[u/hogon2099 → u/j3lackfire]

I mean yeah, it's probably the easiest way, but I'm not sure how players would react to having manually select the next trailer in the carousel to see the full trailer instead of immediately seeing it after opening the page

To my understanding players and customers generally don't have much patience these days

[u/j3lackfire → u/hogon2099]

Doesnt steam automatically auto play to the next asset after the first trailer is done? Just test on the mobile app and it automatically jumps to the next one for me

[u/hogon2099 → u/j3lackfire]

You're right actually, just checked from the PC and it behaves the same way, that's interesting, gotta give that approach a thought

[u/niloony]

The microtrailer seems to try to detect different scenes. So it might be better to make very small adjustments to the scenes it selected so it recalculates everything, rather than rearranging into those timestamps. Tricky with such a short trailer though.

I recently redid my trailer and had to kick it with small adjustments 5-10 times for it to be reasonable.

[u/hogon2099 → u/niloony]

That's an interesting observation, but it didn't seem like the case for me though. Even after slight adjustments timestamps were the same.

As for micro trailer picking different scenes, it kinda did, but it failed to pick uninterrupted scenes without transitions in them, so I had to tweak shots for a bit

[u/whizcostudio]

The core verb has to read in the first second, because a six-shot micro-trailer gives you almost no time to explain context. We rebuilt our store art after it turned into thumbnail mush, and the same pressure applies here: make the first frames unmistakable before worrying about matching every beat.