You Might Have to Pay $1 Million to Show Your Trailer at Game Awards
Times are tough, you know...
TGA
The Game Awards is now probably the most well-known show in the industry, so Geoff Keighley expects developers to pay for their seconds of visibility. Warning: the prices might actually shock you.
According to Kotaku's anonymous sources, a three-minute trailer now costs over $1 million to be featured at the event. That's more than twice the price participants had to pay last year: a feature of the same length was $486,600 in 2024.
Two game publishers told Kotaku that they were not familiar with this year’s prices, but it "sounded in line with what they’d expect from previous years."
As Insider Gaming points out, Opening Night Live 2025 was reportedly approximately $500,000 for a three-minute ad, $150,000 for 30 seconds, and $210,000 for a minute. So, it can be assumed that for TGA, the costs should be around $300,000 for 30 seconds and $420,000 for one minute.
In any case, Keighley won't go home poor, as even participating developers have to pay for coming to the show where they are nominated. Apparently, TGA offers only two free tickets to attend the ceremony to studios that are nominated; if you have more people in your team, you'll need to pay.
Creators of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the most nominated game at this year's show, had to buy tickets for about $300 each for its developers.
One developer, who worked on a game nominated at the 2024 Game Awards, said that those who got the full-price tickets from their team were seated in a different part of the venue:
“I was told that the team was offered two tickets as nominees (these tickets come with access to the red carpet and green room experiences), and then provided a link to a page where additional tickets could be purchased,” a lead designer nominated last year told Kotaku. “As far as I could tell, the page was just the publicly available ticket page, and there were no discounts or special access to ticket allotments (i.e., particular seats in the theater) available.”
What's more, the game director purchased their ticket from the public-facing ticket pool for around $700: “I didn’t want to miss a likely once-in-a-lifetime experience of being there in person for a nominated game that I’d had a major hand in, so I paid.”
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