Showing One-Minute Trailer at Summer Game Fest Reportedly Costs Devs $250,000
The opening ceremony of Summer Game Fest is quite expensive for devs and publishers who want to showcase their games at the event organized by Geoff Keighley.
Presenting game materials at the opening ceremony of the Summer Game Fest will cost publishers and developers $250,000 per minute and $550,000 for 150 seconds. At least that's what emerges from the information provided by the Esquire service about the event organized by Geoff Keighley for many years.
Expensive Summer Game Fest
The Esquire editorial team reportedly received these amounts from marketing specialists after one of the website's anonymous sources bluntly stated that appearing at the SGF is "extremely costly" for game devs. For context: this means that last year, developers and publishers paid the event organizers almost $10 million ($9.65 million).
Including one minute of material during the stream costs more than reserving all 6,000 seats in the YouTube Theatre for participation in this year's Summer Game Fest (tickets cost $41, totaling $246,000, via Ticketmaster).
It's important to remember that we are discussing the prices for the show at last year's SGF edition. Esquire didn't obtain information about the cost of displaying shorter materials, such as half-minute or even "faster" teasers.
Popularity of SGF
In this context, it may be surprising that you can see any games from independent studios at the Summer Game Fest at all. Paying over half a million dollars for a more extensive gameplay trailer is a significant expense for such teams, let alone $100,000.
However, there is a reason why SGF organizers may require such amounts from developers. After the death of E3, the Summer Game Fest was the second most popular game presentation in June last year.
The stream in 2023 drew in 2 million simultaneous viewers at its peak, nearly doubling the viewership of Ubisoft Forward. Only the broadcast of Xbox Games Showcase & Starfield Direct was watched by more people at the same time, which isn't surprising. Bethesda's new RPG presentation garnered significant interest, and also featured materials from the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion and Forza Motorsport.
Summer Game Fest 2024 will begin today at 2:00 PT (with a preshow half an hour earlier). The opening ceremony broadcast will go on for 2 hours.
