The audience already watches clips
Gaming is unusual: watching the product being used is itself entertainment. Players have spent a decade discovering games through streams and clips.
That means clip marketing is not an imported tactic here. It is the native behaviour of the audience, and a studio that funds it is simply participating in a system that already exists.
Trailers assert; clips demonstrate
A trailer tells a player the game is exciting. A clip lets them watch someone else be excited. The second is more persuasive because it is less controlled.
The clips that work are frequently ones a marketing department would never have chosen — a glitchy physics moment, an absurd failure, a comeback that should not have happened.
Rights are the blocker
The most common reason gaming clip programs stall is legal. If clippers cannot use footage without an approval chain, the volume never materialises.
Decide in advance what is permitted, publish it plainly, and make it generous. The studios that win here treat their footage as distribution, not as an asset to be guarded.
Beyond launch
Marketing budgets concentrate around release dates. Clips do not respect release dates: a moment from a two-year-old game can circulate and bring in players who never saw the launch campaign.