A Steam trailer has to do a very specific job in under a minute: communicate what the game is, prove it's real, and make someone wishlist before they scroll past. That's a harder brief than it sounds, and it's why full automation isn't there yet, even as individual pieces of the pipeline get easier.
What's genuinely automatable today
Capturing and organizing footage, cutting to a rough beat, and testing different music tracks against the same cut are all faster with AI-assisted editing tools than they were a couple of years ago. If your bottleneck was "I don't know video editing software," that bottleneck is much smaller now.
What still needs a human decision
Which ten seconds of gameplay actually sell the game. This is a judgment call about your specific audience and your specific hook, and it's the single highest-leverage decision in the entire trailer. An AI editing tool can help you execute a cut once you know what story the trailer should tell. It won't tell you what story to tell.
Where fully AI-generated trailer footage falls short
Video generation models can produce eye-catching short clips, but they're generating an approximation of your game, not a real capture of it. Using synthetic footage in a Steam trailer risks misrepresenting the actual product, which is both against store policy in most cases and the single fastest way to earn refund requests and bad reviews from players who feel misled. Real capture, AI-assisted editing, is the honest and currently reliable combination.
The actual AI-assisted trailer workflow that works
Record real gameplay footage generously, more than you think you need. Use AI tools to help organize and rough-cut it fast. Test multiple music tracks and multiple opening shots against real viewers, even a handful of honest opinions beats guessing. Keep every frame a real capture of the real game.
The one metric that tells you if it worked
Wishlist conversion from the store page, visible in Steamworks. A trailer's job is measurable. If a new cut doesn't move that number, the trailer didn't work regardless of how polished the editing was.