one of my side jobs at work, appart from being a QA tester is creating trailers for their games. I agree with you about the CG cutscenes, I show maybe 5 shot of CG and the rest is game footage, because I want to see how the game plays, not how well the CG looks. We're selling the game by showing the player gameplay not for the awesome CG Opening 
however, Blizzard, SquareEnix, Capcom openings always sell me 
1. It all depends on the game, companies like Blizzard and Square who make cinematics that are orgasmically good should pimp them for all they are worth, as should games like Final Fantasy and Silent Hill who have cinematics for critical scenes when they could've used in-game cinematics just for the extra quality - as in the actual game these jumps are made. (See 3 for the rest on in-game footage).
2. I've never saw ANY trailers for games at the Cinema and the ones on the TV are extremely cheesy looking pieces of crap – usually for bad xbox games Microsoft is trying to market. The only TV advert that stuck with me was Silent Hill – which was just a dark gloomy door that opens into complete darkness – then a light passes from one side to the other highlighting a bloody piece of flesh on the ground. This was neither cinematic nor game footage though, but props to whomever designed that. I download trailers, though I don’t actually search for any but games I’m going to like regardless and just want a teaser of. Of course I’m linked to them all the time on forums.
3. You should be able to see some gameplay footage. It's good to splice between the two so long as the cinematics and in-game footage aren't radically different. If so, like in Blizzards games for example – releasing separate trailers for each isn’t such a bad idea. The trailer for FFXII on the other hand, flicks quickly between CG scenes - with no action going on, then shows gameplay footage with no action, then it jumps quickly into a dark in-game scene to in-game battles and leaps into the action cinematics of airships falling apart causing massive explosions in the cities below as the backing soundtrack picks up. Really gives the trailers ending that “whoa” factor as the games name appears on screen - which is ultimately what they are looking for.
4. Visuals, Action, Humour, Emotion, Story. Visuals are most important because they are a main selling point for games these days. Action also gives the player a fragment of the game they want to see, they might spent most of the game talking to NPC’s and travelling from locations but they don’t want to see that crap. Humour is good IF YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING, I found Blizzards 10 second scene of Alliance characters dancing to strange music after their E3 World of Warcraft trailer had climaxed to be very amusing and put emphasis on the humour they put in their games, but this is very dodgy ground. As for the others: If you can give significant story pieces in such a small time frame you’ve a game with little story elements in the first place, and emotion is pretty hard to place other than clips of characters getting hot and bothered.
5. Never does anything for me.
everyone that has answered that you really MUST see ingame stuff in a trailer is LYING!YOU ALL LOVE THE BLIZZARD TRAILES!!
It's worth mentioning Blizzard usually release multiple trailers both cinematic and game-footage orientated
Quote from JynxDaddyYeh we all like the trailers, but the games....
Excluding you, we all like the games.
yes, but everyone is always talking about the cinematic one! "my god that game looks cool! Did you see the intro??!1 OMFG!!"
that kind of stuff...
i love em :]
even when i bought starcraft, and it had this Diablo 2 trailer on it...
just this guy sitting in this cart, driving up on this little road on a cliff in the mountains or something with voice overs...
it rocked ass! (i dont think they released any game-preview-trailers to those games)..
thats something theyve started with now... WC3, etc... i think...
I'm playing diablo2 right now and the cutscenes are wow-tastic!
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