Something a little different this fortnight. I don’t ordinarily talk much about what we might call the politics of the games industry, or games media, which is largely because I have very little to do with those aspects of the world of games, and particularly the triple-A games that (broadly speaking) dominate both. However, as I’m sure many of you are aware, gametrailers.com was abruptly shut down a little while ago. There have been many good analyses written about what caused this, and I’m not going to repeat any of the (no doubt astute) observations about the current state of games media they propose (and if I was going to, I would have been a little more speedy in uploading this entry). Instead, this closure – one that isn’t, I think, especially surprising, in the era of the Youtube and Twitch gaming celebrity – sent me onto a trail of reflection about my own history with the site, and what feels to me like a very distinctive moment in the history of games, and specifically the history of game trailers as a sub-genre of media in their own right. It’s a strange case where I find myself unable to say – was this just me, or did everyone around my age have this phase? – and that’s what I effectively want to ask here. We have a range of age demographics reading this blog, so I expect I’ll have people who fan out at least ten years on either side of my age, and as such I’m interested to read everyone’s reflections on the rise (and fall?) of trailers as a crucial part of online gaming culture and discussion.

In a certain period, between the time of Half-Life 2 and Halo 3, I remember a stratospheric growth of Gametrailers as a website, and also the importance assigned to game trailers as a concept; with them all in one place, there was genuine interest in specific new trailers for new releases, and substantial analysis of what was shown in these trailers. This was the case even if those trailers were tiny and just a little bit different from what had come before; Gametrailers being the very regular, careful, formalised site it was, helped to generate this feeling that trailers were very important substantial things in gaming by themselves, rather than transient adverts for a future product. It also, of course, put everything in one place, and enabled a very easy transition from one to the next. I remember myself watching those trailers over and over, and – looking back as the mid-twenties academic, upon the mid-teens gameplayer I then was – I realize now that this was at least in large part because of the name of the website, and the concept that game trailers – not necessarily reviews, or commentary, or information, although those were all present – were, by themselves, noteworthy enough to post and display and think about. The mere fact that such a website existed seemed to imbue all game trailers with a degree of importance that went far beyond the noteworthiness one might ordinarily expect. These were events in their own right, and although obviously not as substantial as the actual release of the game itself, I do remember a rapid growth of discussion and commentary that came out of this, exploring what could be seen on trailers, what it meant for the games in question when they would eventually be released, and so on and so forth.

The final trailer that had this effect on me was the Halo 3 announcement trailer, if I remember correctly. My recollection is that this was actually something of an event in its own right, not just for those who were fans of Halo, but within game trailers as an entire sub-genre of media; it had a countdown if I recall, the countdown was highly visible, the trailer was quite “big-budget”, and it all added up to an event that was a meaningful percentage of the final product in terms of importance and visibility. However, in the present day, it seems as if the trailer for a new game isn’t the incredible excitement it was in that era. Am I incorrect? It’s very possible that it’s just my shift away from a segment of the gaming world that puts a lot of importance upon these kinds of “reveal”, but nevertheless, when I survey Twitter or gaming news sites or my friends who are very interested in triple-A games, it never feels as if trailers are something deeply fascinating any more. I can’t think of any major trailer reveals that have had the same kind of impact in the last few days; without doubt, the initial trailers for games like Mass Effect Andromeda have been noteworthy, but without the central hub of Gametrailers, they feel as if they matter only to the community they’re aimed at, rather than to gaming as a whole. Am I right in saying this was a particular historical epoch? And if so, what actually created it?

Although this entry is another “throwing out ideas and seeing if they stick” post of the sort I’ve done several of in the last few months, I think I can still present a few hypotheses about what made Gametrailers so successful in that era. I’ve already recounted some of what made it so successful per se – the elevation of the trailer into something more important than it had ever been before, the creation of a user interface specifically designed for trailers, all trailers being located on a single website, and so forth. I think there are two other elements: for one, the era I’m talking about here was largely before the massive explosion of independent games, and therefore the majority of game interest was in triple-A games. These games tended to have major high-production-value trailers, and these trailers therefore tended to therefore accrue a lot of interest themselves. I think these elements each reinforced the other, creating a world where the trailers for these kinds of games became especially important, and where the number of high-popularity trailers was somewhat smaller than it was today (this was also, of course, before the recent explosion of games on Steam, Steam Greenlight, Steam Workshop, etc, etc). These elements came together, I suspect, to focus more community attention upon trailers, and therefore upon the website that curated them. Secondly, this was obviously an era before Youtube and Twitch. We couldn’t have access to all of our “manufactured” game video content on a single website (Youtube), and we didn’t have access to a massive amount of player-created content on two websites (Youtube and Twitch);. Although the latter tends not to include trailers, they have nevertheless surely shifted the overall attention of gamers towards these websites and away from smaller organisations who had a very specific and much smaller remit – as in the case of game trailers. Perhaps there are other elements too – what do you think? – but I think in this very initial analysis we can already start to see some of the broader elements within the games industry that came together to implicitly support the emergence of a website like Gametrailers, alongside what Gametrailers itself obviously did in order to make itself a success.

With the departure of Gametrailers, that era – or at least my personal subjective appreciation of that era – really feels like it has come to an end, with trailers now distributed through a range of sources and origins and websites, rather than being centralised on a website where you couldn’t only find the newest trailer for the game you were interested in, but also readily transition into looking at trailers for other games, with an ease and simplicity that, I think, even Youtube hasn’t actually fully matched (within the niche genre of game trailers, that is). I think there is something substantial here we can unpick about a particular moment in games, and although in this entry I’ve only been able to put out some initial thoughts, I’m confident we can identify some important developments and changes in the games industry in the emergence, lifespan, decline, and subsequent disappearance, of Gametrailers as a website and the very specific service that it offered. Has the presentation of triple-A games, especially to those who are not their initial audience, actually shifted as much as it feels it has to me?

There’s definitely more we can draw out of the study of trailers, I think, as they do so much to shape our expectations and assumptions around games, being effectively the most central kind of media that circulates before a game’s release. So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – what were your experiences with Gametrailers? What do you think made it so successful in that era? And for those who do follow the triple-A world these days, have the social and community behaviours around trailers changed all that much, or have they largely just shifted onto other websites?

And at some point… I should really make a URR trailer.

Comments and Replies

Lastly and briefly: my apologies for being slow on replies to blog comments in the past few weeks. I try to reply to every single comment ever posted on this blog (except those which are the clearly the end of a conversation thread, of course), but my current busyness levels have made it tricky to prioritise keeping up with this obligation; however, I’ve just gone through all the comments from the last few blog entries, so if you left a comment there, a reply should now be in place…

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