What Can AAA Games Marketers Learn From Indies?

Tips from the creator of some of indie gaming's greatest trailers

I got a handful of really interesting responses to last week’s Games Marketers Are In Crisis Mode.

One that particularly grabbed my attention was an email from Derek Lieu, the well-known creative director and editor behind trailers for indie games like Among Us, Spelunky 2, Firewatch, and even the occasional big-budget hit like Half-Life: Alyx (see above).

Lieu admitted to feeling surprised and sort of confused by the struggles big-budget games marketers have been facing recently. He wondered how much these struggles can be blamed on AAA teams making easily-avoided mistakes.

With Lieu’s permission, I’ll just quote from his email here:

…SO many AAA games’ Steam pages are full of common mistakes that would bury indie games.

For example, bad capsule descriptions, bad description sections with no GIFs, no HUD/UI in screenshots, trailers which have no gameplay (or take too long to get to them)…

AAA screenshots are often super artful but low on information quality.

AAA always struck me as people working on a galaxy brain level compared to me, but I’ve always been curious to what degree they might actually have stuff to learn from indie marketing folks 🤔

I know exactly what Lieu means about assuming big-budget games teams are somehow galaxy-brain geniuses. But my experience has been that, if you actually get a job working at a AAA studio, you find that there are no galaxy brains.¹ They’re all just regular people who have deeply absorbed a ton of institutional knowledge.

Most of the marketers that work at big budget games studios are actually really good at their jobs, because they’ve observed and internalized literally decades’ worth of best practices and rules-of-thumb—if you’re an observational, thoughtful person, you just sort of pick this stuff up from coworkers.

So when you're launching products into environments that these institutions have typically been good in, you look like a genius. But as soon as the context changes (as it is now, across the entire media ecosystem) the best practices and rules-of-thumb start working less well.

This, I believe, is what we’re seeing now in the games industry. The context has changed. The environment has changed. And so the big dogs look absolutely lost when they’re trying to ship new IPs.

“I think AAA marketers would have a ton to learn from you,” I wrote back to Lieu. We set up a phone call.

Below are three principles I think big budget game devs could learn from indies like Derek Lieu:

1) Hook Them As Quickly As Possible

On his blog, Lieu has long advocated for a simple three-part structure for video game trailers: Hook > Genre > Content.

He urges game developers to get to the hook—the unique selling point or the most interesting aspect of the game that immediately grabs the player's attention—as soon as you possibly can.

From his blog:

The genre needs to be established first, then move onto the hook, then MAYBE spend some time on content (as in, number of weapons, number of bosses, variety of biomes, etc.)

But if I were to make a more accurate representation of what I think the trailer's structure should be, it would be:

Genre, HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK, Content.

…Pretty much the moment people know what genre they're in, you need to jump to the hook. The hook needs to be within the first third of the trailer and certainly no later than the first half. Ideally it's within the first 10-15 seconds.

—Derek Lieu in How to Hook the Audience and How Quickly to Do It

Lieu walks the talk with his trailers—like the one above for the smash hit game Firewatch.

From the very first moment of this trailer, we’re placed in the player’s perspective. The first 15 seconds establish that Firewatch is a first-person adventure game with a sense of humor. We’re rapidly shown more of the game’s mechanics (the introduction of an axe, rope-climbing, vaulting around gorgeous environments) and buildup of dramatic tension. First the mysterious woman on the other side of the radio warns that others have cracked under the pressure of the job. Then she lays something else on us: “I don’t talk to the other lookouts as much as I talk to you… not in the same way.” A romance subplot?

By the end of the 65-second trailer, we know that something terrible is happening—someone is sabotaging our comms systems, and there’s a stranger in our lookout tower. Who is it? Buy Firewatch to find out.

Humor, romance, a beautiful world, and a chilling mystery. These are phenomenal hooks. And because the entire trailer was captured from an in-game perspective we feel like we already know how to play Firewatch. We know what we can do in the game—we understand its verbs (walking, talking on the radio, vaulting over logs, examining cute turtles). Even if you’re not usually into narrative-driven games, this one’s obviously different.

2) Don’t Be Embarrassed Of Your Niche

“It feels like all AAA marketing makes their promotional material broadly appealing even if the game isn’t,” Lieu says. “For example, so many AAA game trailers look like blockbuster linear Uncharted games even if it’s an open world game or a tactical game.”

The latter game Lieu references here is Aliens: Dark Descent, an isometric, single-player tactical action game where you control a squad of soldiers trying to stop a Xenomorph outbreak. This is a game that wound up earning dedicated fans—see its 88% positive rating with over 12,000 reviews on Steam. But the initial reveal trailer for Dark Descent (see above) buried the actual game footage under cinematic vibe-setting cutscenes.

“It's 98% cinematic in this announcement trailer,” Lieu says. “At the very end, they just snuck it in: Oh, a tactical isometric game. Like, we were always gonna find out! It just shows a lack of confidence.”

The result: many viewers felt misled and disappointed.

Aliens: Dark Descent is not a game for everyone who loves the Aliens franchise, and that’s okay. It’s a great game for a specific niche of players. But those players didn’t get to see what makes the game special in this trailer.

Lieu compares trailers that rely heavily on cinematic footage to “dangling keys in front of a baby.” You’re trying to distract players with shiny footage—a pointless exercise, because they’re not going to pre-order without knowing what your game really is or what makes it special. Even if your game’s genre doesn’t have mass appeal, Lieu says, “you can’t be embarrassed of it.” If you’re making a game that’s great for a specific niche, it’s better to “establish the genre and the things that make it different as soon as possible.”

And then it’s fine to try to signal that you’ve got a big budget and slick cutscenes. That stuff will feel like cherry on the cake for players who have already bought into your core premise.

3) It Has to Be Special

One beef Lieu has with many AAA games is that so much effort goes into proving a game is big and well-produced. And in the process, what makes the game unique gets lost. “There are so many AAA game trailers that are super appealing, with amazing animation and cool VFX,” Lieu says, “but then… I don't get what makes it special. And that’s what kills me.”

For one recent example, Lieu points to the launch trailer for Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed. The first half of the trailer is composed almost entirely of slow, disembodied shots circling around a variety of (admittedly very beautiful) environments. A couple of times we’re introduced to a static character delivering a lore-dense monologue. “I'm just waiting for a shot showing a hand at the bottom of the screen carrying something,” Lieu says. And then when that shot arrives 15 seconds into the trailer, it cuts away two seconds later. “I'm like... Please! Put me back!”

The second half of the trailer shows a number of combat scenes which reveal that, yes—this game is basically Skyrim, but with more spell-based combat. It also has a beautiful world with a rich color palette. But is that really what makes Avowed special?

“It's just not different enough,” Lieu says. “On the surface level, at least, it's not different enough.”

Lieu points out that one of the biggest mistakes game trailers often make is that they fail to establish what the game really is before trying to sell you on details like the world, the story, and vibe.

“I always use an ice cream metaphor,” he says. “You’re like, Hey, check out my new food stand—we’ve got strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla flavors. And I'm like, wait, what are you serving? The flavor of what? Oh, ice cream. We have 2% milk instead of 1%. It's organic… I’m not going to leave my house for that.”

Imagine asking a customer to drive 45 minutes to taste your ice cream—or to play your game. Is what you’re offering really different and special enough for that?

“Maybe,” Lieu says, “if it’s like, liquid nitrogen ice cream.”

That’s it for this week. I gotta go check the freezer for frozen snack options.

I’ll see you next Friday.

1. Except for Anton Borkel, an actual galaxy-brain marketing genius