Masahiro Sakurai has proven time and time again with his “Creating Games” videos that he “gets it.” Sure, he admits that his way of thinking “isn’t for everyone” and that you don’t have to follow everything he does to the letter. Still, he also makes compelling cases as to why you and other game developers should at least consider his words and potentially follow his path. This notion has never been more apt than with his latest video, which talks about gaming trailers and what they choose to show and not show. Specifically, he doesn’t play games whose trailers show nothing about gameplay.
At first, that might seem odd, as plenty of video games do trailers that “introduce the world” and highlight the stories the players will be enjoying. But as Sakurai notes in his videos, the more CGI elements you showcase, the more you’ll leave gamers wondering what kind of gameplay they’ll be enjoying.
So, if you show none at all, you might have people intrigued, but you could leave them hurting later on when they realize that the “super-stylized trailer” they just watched doesn’t match the gameplay they were hoping to see. A certain game with the Suicide Squad comes to mind at that point.
Now, yes, Masahiro Sakurai notes that some games, franchises, and creators can “get away with this,” but we all know cases where that’s not the case. When the video went live, Twitter users went to work to replicate their thoughts on this matter, and that’s where we found this appropriately-themed tweet:
Yep. The Game Awards are infamous for merely showing off CGI trailers and not highlighting the gameplay the gamers will actually participate in! This was in full view during the 2023 show when Hideo Kojima was given ample time to talk about his new game and only showed a CGI trailer that didn’t even HINT at what kind of gameplay there was. Instead, he just gave vague notions of what it would be like, and Geoff Keighley allowed it to happen. Oh, and that was hardly the only trailer that did that at The Game Awards both this year and last year.
Oh, and before you callout Sakurai for this, when his Super Smash Bros reveal trailers have “tons of CGI elements,” do recall that he uses those to “shock” the player with the reveal. Then he goes right into the gameplay footage, which takes up most of the trailers with only a few exceptions.
