I’ve been helping out with FEE3 in some capacity basically since I became comfortable in the community around 2021, though this year my contribution was notably smaller than usual, and this discussion happens every year, without fail. I’m gonna make the same points this year, because my opinion has not changed even as trailers have become more and more popular.
Trailers are easier to consume and have a higher ceiling for quality / attention-grabbing-ness, without a doubt. This isn’t really something that I think is going to be in contention - watching a 2 or 3 minute video is much easier than watching a 20 or 30 minute video, and it is easier to limit those videos to being just a highlight reel if
IF
you know what you’re doing, or have additional resources.
Hiding the rest under here so this message isn't so fuck off long
In the past, this topic comes up alongside sort of unrelated questions of “who is FEE3’s audience intended to be” and “what is the stated goal,” and I think I’m probably just not going to answer those right now - not with intent, at least, and certainly not in this post. Instead, I want to lead with a lot of things that get kind of bulldozed during these discussions.
The first is that trailer quality is actually extremely variable. A bad trailer is rough; it is a skillset that is entirely different from, even at points completely unrelated to, the romhacking process. The people who are making hacks are not necessarily also skilled video editors. Okay; the same can be said for playthroughs, as not all hackers are charismatic LPers, and we resolve this with volunteer work; surely, this is a transitive concept, right?
I don’t believe so. The time commitment, and amount of effort, behind most playthroughs for a volunteer is dramatically lower. As somebody who has done several volunteer LPs, and have at times been told I do a decent job of it, the bulk of the work is doing a single dry run so I know what I’m doing and then otherwise coordinating with anyone else involved in that LP, be that the dev or a co-commentator. This makes it extremely easy to volunteer for, allowing for a show that accepts a very wide pool of applicants and can still run extremely smoothly. A trailer is way more effort, way more workload, and waaay more coordination; it’s also something that would be inaccessible to more people, necessitating either of (or both of) a smaller pool of showcases that make it to the event or a substantially more involved process for the event organizers and those who volunteer to participate.
If these trailers are half-assed, they aren’t going to be de facto better than a half-assed gameplay showcase, and while I obviously will not name names, it’s sort of evident if you watch all of FEE3 that some showcases are lower quality, lower effort, or lower impact - both to a degree where in any body of work, something has to be the “worst one” (I think that each year we have fewer and fewer, besides), and just because some people are simply not as good at selling their project, or their projects are just not as easy to sell through the medium of a youtube video.
The other thing is that most of the trailers that people point to as proof of how well the trailer concept works are the trailers that go significantly above and beyond what the other trailers are offering. This is in part because three+ weeks of trailers for various FE8 hacks, using mostly the same set of vanilla and repo assets, would reveal pretty quickly that it can actually be quite difficult to showcase a romhack in a way that makes it really stand out from the pack, especially so without the use of some additional assets. Voice acting, bespoke artwork, music, or even just experience in video editing and access to better software can dramatically affect how well a trailer lands, and I don’t know if it’s being properly understood just how many people a trailer mandate would exclude from the event.
There’s also the question of LTCs, which also popped off this year and were very well received; again, these are much more limited. You need somebody who actually knows how to LTC, is willing to do an LTC for your project, has time to chart and record one, and still find time to, in the process, show off what makes the game cool. I enjoyed this kind of showcase quite a bit, as much as I’m not really interested in the LTC scene generally, and while I think these are less severe restrictions than you see with trailers, it is important to note that any push towards quality control of the event is also a push towards making that event higher effort.
I’ll take now to point out, maybe snarkily, that the people making this push are also almost never the people who actually participate in helping run the event, so take that how you will.
The FE hacking scene has been around for a while, but in terms of this particular era of post-builder hacking renaissance, quite young overall, and certainly smaller than many other scenes with similar events. As such, FEE3 has actually had to grow and evolve extremely quickly, far more quickly I think than people have given it credit for - just a couple years prior, the event was so taxing to run that it nearly burnt some people out on the community at large, and there was constantly some kind of conflict or controversy for the organizers to have to help resolve.
Much of the event’s current state is a hedge against this; the number of casual consumers of this event has dramatically outstripped the number of users willing to help run it, making it very difficult to grow in tandem alongside the audience without putting more and more stress onto the already small crew running things.
We don’t have a consistent FEE3 team who runs these things; we’re just hackers who want to help showcase what people in the community are doing. I am not in FEU to do volunteer work for FEE3. Nobody is. Until we either get people who are solely interested in organizing this side of the scene with a substantial time investment on their part, or we get more of the kind of people who have helped run this event in the past, where they’re only helping out on the side or in short bursts, it’s going to be difficult to justify the level of major structural changes that tend to get proposed around this time of year.
I also feel the need to point out that we’ve had gameplay showcases get a ton of views in the past. I’m not going to pretend trailers aren’t objectively more popular - historically, most of the very high view videos from each event are shorter, or have some kind of external hype pushing them up in views, or both.
Cases like the recent Cerberus trailer are really cool and fun surprises, and also very rare; the vast majority of popular showcases are popular because they hook into an existing fandom (see the consistent popularity of vanilla-adjacent hacks, or external fandom like the holoemblem trailer or pokemblem). That’s not to take away from the quality of these hacks, but there are certainly hacks that are similarly impressive that struggle to reach the same heights of popularity as something with a few recognizable characters or a funky cross-fandom hook, or for plain old things like “having cool portraits.”
Many of these showcases, mind you, are LPs.
I remember a while back, there was a big pushback against AAA gaming showcases becoming more and more trailer heavy, with gameplay demos becoming less and less common ways of showcasing a new game. I am positive that, if the event switched to a fully trailer-oriented format, we would be seeing a new cast of people offering their thoughts on how trailers don’t give them enough tangible information about a hack’s gameplay to go off of, and how they wish we’d got back to the old format where the projects get more of a deep dive.
The people saying we should switch fully to trailers are often people who are just… not watching FEE3 in the first place? I’m not sure it’s correct to cater the event towards the people who feel the event is currently not for them, rather than honing it in on the current audience and allowing the event to grow somewhat naturally as projects being higher profile and the scene collects more buzz.
All of this said; if you are interested in the trailer showcases enough to want to see more, I encourage you; go learn to do video editing, then next year demonstrate that prowess and volunteer to help people make a few. If we do, eventually, get to the point that the community actually has this roster of people who we can depend on actually showing up* to do higher effort work for the event, then sure; I would obviously have 0 qualms with scaling the event up, getting more ambitious with how the projects are showcased, and trying to cater the event towards overall higher quality. Until such a time as it’s provably feasible to commit to these changes and still have the event actually happen, and it’s also provably something that improves the event and doesn’t simply make it different, I’m going to remain unconvinced, as I have been since I first volunteered back in 2021.
*we’ve had people offer in the past to step up and do significant chunks of workload on this front in the past, but to my knowledge they have not yet actually become involved in helping run the event. Staking the entire event on the contributions of people who we can’t trust to actually be present when the event begins is… potentially irresponsible? Disaster prone? A bad idea. This is why, again, I would advise people stepping up and contributing as volunteers if they’re passionate about the event undergoing these changes.
On an unrelated note to that entire thing; I liked this year’s FEE3 quite a bit. From a behind the scenes standpoint, it was almost seamless, even moreso than an already silky smooth 2022 FEE3. In many regards, the current format allowed the event to more or less run itself, with a deep pool of prior experience for new organizers to draw from and an extremely streamlined and comfy content creation pipeline.
I agree with all 5 points made by bpat, as well, and despite that whole rant hiding a bit above this, I’d also agree with Parrhesia’s take that bringing the time limit down to something closer to 30 or 45 minutes would be good; while this does make some hacks much harder to showcase (a project as complex as Daughters of Bragheduun was a struggle to fit even half the map into an hour’s time, for instance), I think overall it will encourage snappier, denser, more informative LPs in the future.
A lot of the showcases were really surprising and high quality, and it’s always nice to see familiar projects again. I particularly enjoy the discussion these videos can foster - this last year has seen a pretty substantial rise in the popularity of these sort of “romhack-general-chat” discord channels/servers, and it was easier than ever to feel the ripple effect of a new FEE3 showcase when you’d see people playing the games being shown off in the days following an upload. I mentioned it earlier, but Cerberus was a particular standout for me, as it’s very rare for projects to spring fully formed from the ether like this with while also having that level of care put into their presentation.
On a personal level, I was a little bummed that I didn’t get to volunteer for more projects this year - I think that having a more obvious or readily available list of volunteer LPers next year would be really nice, bc I always like getting to talk to devs I wouldn’t usually get to talk to, finding out about their hacks, and helping them show it off as best I can. It worked out nicely, at least, with how busy this year has been for me already, but nonetheless I ended up primarily doing showcases for people I already knew, which to me lost a bit of the fun I’d had with previous years.
I’m hoping I can be more present for next year’s FEE3, and I wanna give a huge shout-out to bpat for being very communicative throughout each step of the event. To what small capacity I was able to contribute this year, he consistently made it easier and more stress free, and from what I saw elsewhere, I believe this to have been generally the case across the board. Thanks, boat! 
the LTC showcases were a consistent highlight, and a very fun way to spice up the FEE3 formula, which is exactly why I think more people should get involved with the event. Getting new people into the event will help introduce new ideas, and eventually those ideas will catch on.