Is getting into a high-profile showcase enough to help your game succeed?
History tells us that the answer is unfortunately “no.” Plenty of games like Build A Rocket Boy’s Mindseye will land a sweet spot in a highly-watched showcase and still struggle to stick the landing. Succeeding in an event like Gamescom Opening Night Live, the Future Games Show or an Xbox Showcase takes strategy and a ton of forethought.
But what can a developer do besides “make a good trailer?” And how do they make their game appealing to showcase curators like Xbox, The Game Awards, or Future? According to Xbox head of premiere broadcasts Tina Amini, the answer to both question comes down to one word: “surprise.”
In conversations after this year’s Xbox Showcase, Amini and other developers from Quarter Up, Microbird Games, and Pine Creek Games explained how exploring that surprise factor helps developers succeed in broadcasts like this year’s Xbox Showcase (this conversation took place before Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, among them hundreds of game developers at companies like King, Zenimax, Activision Blizzard, and beyond).
It’s not just about sticking a “world reveal” tag in front of your trailer—it’s using those critical moment in the months before launch to show curators and players why they can’t look away from your game.
Creating contrast between your game and big first-party hits
While other organizations may only run one or two livestreaming broadcasts per year, Amini explained her job is to produce nine events across a 12-month cycle. These include high-profile streams like the SGF and Gamescom-aligned showcases, and more curated affairs like the January Developer Direct.
Amini and her Xbox colleagues plan these events around major Xbox marketing beats like this year’s reveal of the ROG Xbox Ally, or major game unveilings like Obsidian Entertainment’s Grounded 2, but then take a broad look at developers at third-party developers (often ones with some kind of relationship with Microsoft) to fill out the show.
“For the June showcase in particular, we start talking internally by the end of the [prior] year, but it’s not until January where conversations really start solidifying,” Amini said in regards to picking games to show off. Developers can sometimes pitch as little as a slide deck or as much as a development build to get her team’s attention.
“We want to get representation across the industry…because we know our audience is diverse too,” she said, pointing to player reactions for the reveal of indie game There Are No Ghosts At The Grand from developer Friday Sundae. “They’re going to be the people who on post-show podcasts are talking about No Ghosts At The Grand versus the big shooters.”
In other words: it’s counterprogramming. Pine Creek Games CEO Benjamin Salqvist explained that when his studio’s game Winter Burrow debuted in the 2023 Xbox Showcase, the “hand-drawn comic book art style” proved to be a distinct differentiator
Image via Pine Creek Games/Noodlecake.
There Are No Ghosts At The Grand was selected this year as part of what Amini described as a “business message” of promoting Xbox Play Anywhere, selling the different kinds of games that might be appropriate across the wide range of devices that can support Xbox Game Pass. But no matter what Xbox’s business message is, Amini’s old journalism instincts still guide her to look for the “news factor” of the games they select.
The news factor doesn’t have to be a world premiere or a big launch date announcement (though those are both fine options if that’s your pitch to Xbox). If you previously announced a game and players haven’t heard from it in a while, it showing up with a fresh new trailer can be the news factor. Shadow dropping a game can be a news factor. Even a presentation of the development team can be the news factor.
Here Amini referred to Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 which made its debut in the 2024 Xbox Showcase (the game made its debut on Xbox Game Pass as well as PC and PlayStation 5). After a few months marketing beats based on the game’s story and combat, Xbox pivoted to another strategy in the January Developer Direct. Instead of relying solely on gameplay footage, the company went behind-the-scenes at Sandfall’s Montpellier office, diving deep into how the relatively smaller studio was behind such an ambitious turn-based role-playing game.
After Clair Obscur hit big, online conversation turned to amazement at the fact that a team of fewer than 50 core developers could pull off such a feat (some erroneously stated that the game was made by “fewer than 30” people. Clair Obscur’s credits list about 400 people, which includes external support in gameplay animation and QA. This number also includes voice actors, performance capture artists, musicians, and publishing support from Kepler Interactive).
“It’s a surprise of its own because…they came out of seemingly left field,” Amini said, adding that one of her goals for the “Xbox Partner Preview” event was for players years down the line to look back at previous show lineups and say “Xbox has really good taste for games.”
The path to landing in a premiere showcase
Microbird cofounder Phillip Seifried explained to Game Developer that in his experience, Xbox has a “really high” bar for entry. “It’s a multi-step process,” he explained. “After getting invited to apply, you’ll send a storyboard, then an animatic, and so on. At each of these stages there’s a good chance your game will be eliminated because let’s face it, there are so many great games out there competing for these spots.”
Amini said in this part of the process her “writers room” of producers and marketers uses the team’s different tastes to pick games that represent different genres, eventually “putting a bet” down on games that they think will resonate with players because it resonates with them.
What follows isn’t so much a process of “just send us your trailer,” it’s effectively a rapid marketing consultation project as developers prepare storyboards and animatics of what they’ll display in the show. She said she regularly helps developers tweak their trailers at the earliest possibility for a maximum return, and she regularly sees players react to showcased games in a way that validates her feedback.
“Great trailers show you something interesting every couple of seconds—a great vista, an unusual gameplay mechanic or some action that builds upon it, an intriguing piece of dialogue, or something mysterious, epic, or funny,” observed Microbird’s other cofounder Regina Reisinger.
Image via Quarter Up/Skybound.
Amini also said her team sometimes selects games that can quickly drive “intrigue” among players. She pointed to 2025 Showcase participant Quarter Up (which is owned by Skybound) as a case study of this strategy. “You’ll see a name—it might be a studio name—and there might be intrigue from the audience,” Amini said. “They’ll go ‘what is Skybound doing with this new studio?'” She described these players as the ones who will “investigate” what they see, and learn details like how Quarter Up was founded for the specific purpose of making the Invincible-themed fighting game Invincible VS.
Quarter Up executive producer Chris Paulson explained that in its run-up appearance to the showcase, the team worked carefully to ensure preparing assets and a demo build for the Showcase didn’t eat too much into the game’s development. “I really appreciate the [online] setup, having been involved in multiple E3s before,” said Paulson. “This is really better for for the developer.”
What metrics can you expect from a showcase?
Even though these games aren’t necessarily “the stars” of the broadcast, the developers we spoke with said they saw quantifiable data showing its impact.
Seifried said he was able to compare the reception to Dungeons of Hinterland across the Xbox Showcase and another showcase called the Wholesome Direct. “The Xbox showcase casts a very wide net,” he said, while Wholesome Direct put the dungeon crawling vacation simulator in front of a “smaller audience” very focused on its niche. After revealing the game and launching its Steam page in a 2023 Xbox showcase, the game racked up 19,000 wishlists during the event.
Salqvist told Game Developer that Winter Burrow landed 10k Steam wishlists after its appearance in the same event. Quarter Up declined to share any wishlist statistics for their reveal—but if you’re looking for a decent marketing benchmark, it shared that the team racked up over 92,000 followers across its social media platform in the 72 hours after the reveal.
Succeeding in a streaming showcase at any scale is still more of an art than a science. But just like good art, there’s plenty of technique under the surface that can ensure your game stands out in a crowded field.