A look at which games trailers get the most attention
As we wound down from E3 last year, the view count for theFinal Fantasy VIItrailer on the PlayStation YouTube channel surprised me and so I set out to take a casual glance at PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo’s official channels to seewhat was performing best. And I figured I’d do that again this year.
Possibly an important contextual consideration:PlayStationhas 4.7M subscribers,Nintendo1.8M, andXbox1.6M.
Let’s be straight: it’sLegend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There’s no above-10-million-view video like the one that caught my eye forFinal Fantasy VII(now nearing 14 million views) last year, but that’s an issue of format. For example, the mainZeldatrailer on the channel has racked up 6.7M views — beating out the 2DS announcement for best in channel history. But there’s another 1M for that same trailer onNintendo Japan‘s side. Plus there are like 20 more separateBreath of the Wildvideos — from amiibo functionality to hunting and gathering demonstrations — that each have anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 views. Nintendo cleaned up.
I was surprised to find theXbox One Sannouncement video sitting at 9.2M on Xbox’s YouTube — good for highest single viewed video of E3andsecond on the Xbox channel all-time to a randomGears 4video from a couple months back (16.2M). The One S beat out the video for the original Xbox One reveal (7M) and Project Scorpio (2M). The other well-performing thing out of Microsoft?Halo Wars 2trailer at 4.4M, which is actually better thanUncharted 4,The Last Guardian, andHorizon Zero Dawndid for Sony last year.
Sony this year came close toFinal Fantasy VII‘s heights with anewGod of War, which is sitting at 9M views, interestingly shy of the 9.8M mark set by a 2013God of War: AscensionSuper Bowl trailer, if you needed a reminder that none of this means anything nor does it make any sense. Two differentUncharted 4videos from the last month are around 10M each and aHorizon Zero Dawnvideo from a week before E3 is doing better at 7M than Sony’s E3 showing of the game (1.5M).Resident Evil 7comes out with a surprisingly low draw of sub-1M and the twoDays Gonevideos hit for 1.4M and 900k, respectively, whileSpider-Manhit 2.7M.
That’s it. A fractional way to judge interest in E3’s biggest games, ignoring those who tuned in live or caught weird video embeds elsewhere or are otherwise unrepresented. I hope you found this exercise to be mildly interesting and ultimately pointless.
