Overview

As part of the release process on Steam, you will be required to upload a trailer for your product. Trailers are displayed at the top of your product's store page and are often one of the first things your potential customers will be seeing.

Best Practices

Trailers are important in marketing your product on Steam. You want to think about the context of where your trailer will appear. For example, the customer may be going through their Discovery Queue and looking at games that are recommended to them, and you may have less than 10 seconds to make an impression. Or the customer may be watching your trailer without any audio. You will want to think about how long it takes for the customer to learn about your product, and if they can learn about it without audio.

Check out this presentation from Steam Dev Days 2016 for general best practices for trailers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eok0W1nKjM0&t=14m41s

Uploading a Trailer

You can go to the Store Page Admin > Trailers tab to upload your trailer. The trailer should be the highest resolution that you have, up to 1920 x 1080 resolution, 30/29.97 or 60/59.94 fps, high bit rate (5,000+ Kbps) and in .mov, .wmv, or .mp4 container files. H.264 video and AAC audio is preferred, but we can transcode from many formats. 16:9 aspect ratio is preferred since the Steam client is optimized for widescreen, but 4:3 aspect ratio is accepted. Please note that audio will be filtered down to regular stereo when we transcode the videos.

Advanced Settings

The Advanced Settings can be used if you have trailers in multiple languages or need to restrict them to certain countries. You will not need to use the Advanced Settings if your trailer is visible to all countries and languages.

You can set the language that specific trailers will show to customers that have their settings set to that language. The Base video should be set to the English trailer if you have trailers in multiple languages. See Localization and Languages for more information.

If you have PEGI and ESRB rated videos that should only appear in certain countries, you can restrict the visibility of your trailer to certain countries by using the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 language codes. (Example: DE,FR,US,CA,MX)

My Trailer is Stuck Converting!

The trailer processing system works in a FIFO queue. If there is a long queue of trailers ahead of yours, then it may take a few hours to complete the conversion. The position in the queue is reported for each trailer in the Trailers tab. Note: Deletion / re-submission will move the trailer to the back of the queue.

My Trailer processing ended with an error!

The most common reason for a trailer to fail is the resolution of the video. Please ensure you use a common resolution such as 1920x1080 or 1280x720 to avoid any downstream processing issues. Another common issue is an unsupported audio sample rate (please use 44Khz or 48Khz).

Adobe Media Encoder Presets

Download these presets for Adobe Media Encoder CC to create compatible video files for Steam. The preset to use is:

• H.264 Video (20Mbs) with AAC Stereo Audio (192Kbps).