A look at which games trailers get the most attention
As we wound down from E3 last year, the view count for the Final Fantasy VII trailer 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 see what was performing best. And I figured I’d do that again this year.
Possibly an important contextual consideration: PlayStation has 4.7M subscribers, Nintendo 1.8M, and Xbox 1.6M.
Let’s be straight: it’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There’s no above-10-million-view video like the one that caught my eye for Final Fantasy VII (now nearing 14 million views) last year, but that’s an issue of format. For example, the main Zelda trailer 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 on Nintendo Japan‘s side. Plus there are like 20 more separate Breath of the Wild videos — 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 the Xbox One S announcement video sitting at 9.2M on Xbox’s YouTube — good for highest single viewed video of E3 and second on the Xbox channel all-time to a random Gears 4 video 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 2 trailer at 4.4M, which is actually better than Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, and Horizon Zero Dawn did for Sony last year.
Sony this year came close to Final Fantasy VII‘s heights with a new God of War, which is sitting at 9M views, interestingly shy of the 9.8M mark set by a 2013 God of War: Ascension Super Bowl trailer, if you needed a reminder that none of this means anything nor does it make any sense. Two different Uncharted 4 videos from the last month are around 10M each and a Horizon Zero Dawn video from a week before E3 is doing better at 7M than Sony’s E3 showing of the game (1.5M). Resident Evil 7 comes out with a surprisingly low draw of sub-1M and the two Days Gone videos hit for 1.4M and 900k, respectively, while Spider-Man hit 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.