Ranging from our Kickstarter trailer videos from 2012-2015 (featuring me and Alan talking directly to the camera) to polished, animated trailers with voiceovers from 2016-2024, we’ve tried a variety of approaches to the initial video introduction. Starting in 2025, we tried a new method that I’ll discuss today.

A Few Disclaimers

First, some groundwork: I believe that the purpose of an announcement trailer (or crowdfunding video) is to give people a small taste to entice them to learn more. 60 seconds is my target length; I don’t have a time restriction on other videos in which I’m trying to explain how the game works.

Second, a contradiction: I think music makes a big difference in announcement trailers (big thanks to my brother-in-law, Joel, for composing the music for our videos), but I also think that these videos need to function with the sound off (research shows that 85% of people watch videos with sound off on social media).

Third, I’ve come to believe that static images are just as effective as animations, and they work better when someone pauses the video. This came to me when I was scripting the Vantage trailer, partially due to the constraint that I didn’t want to spoil anything about what you might discover after crashing on the planet.

Our Current Method

Add all this together, and you get a video that doesn’t take long to script and can be created on a small budget (less than $1,000 for music and videography). After I prepare the script and I receive the music from Joel, I send them to the amazing Emmanuel Ho, who integrates images from the game to form the video.

One other nice perk for this method is that it’s really easy for localization partners to use the same video, whether they translate the text as subtitles on YouTube or they swap out the English text for their language using the source files.

Now, I’m not saying this is the only way to make effective teaser trailers in 2026 or that our trailers are perfect. It’s a challenge for me to describe the hooks of the game in less than 10 words per scene. I’ll continue to hone this skill. But overall I really like this method, and I’m really happy with how our recent Braided Skies trailer turned out.

Data

Whether 1,000 people or 100,000 people watch your announcement trailer, if you go through the trouble of making it in the first place, I believe in using methods that encourage retention. That is, if only 10% of people watch the last half of the trailer, why not make it half as long (and more focused) instead?

That’s why I aim for 60 seconds at most for our videos. I think they could be even tighter (45 seconds when possible), but the data is encouraging. Of the 47,000 people who have watched the 53-second Braided Skies trailer, on average people are watching 72% of the video.

I took a look at our other recent trailers that use a similar structure:

• Vantage: 14,312 views, 31 seconds, 79% average percentage viewed
• Origin Story: 9,830 views, 45 seconds, 75%
• Euphoria Essential: 2,874 views, 54 seconds, 69%
• Duel of Meloch: 16,378 views, 61 seconds, 73%
• Wingspan Pocket: 43,426 views, 53 seconds, 70%

Again, this is far from the only way to offer an effective announcement trailer. I really enjoyed the human connection and weirdness of the Shug trailer a few months ago, and recently the Baba Is You trailer used mostly a series of photos (ala stop motion) to generate nearly 150k views.

What do you look for in an announcement trailer to pique your interest and inspire you to learn more?

Also read:

• Kickstarter Lesson #260: The Teaser Trailer
• What Can Kickstarter Project Videos Learn from Facebook Videos?

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