“It’s terribly expensive.” The price companies pay to attend Summer Game Fest is much higher than you probably imagined.

How much do developers pay to participate in Summer Game Fest? Depending on who you are, the answer is zero or more than half a million dollars.

Figure Geoff Keighley This is something that almost always causes conflicting feelings. Thanks to him we have Summer gaming festival that replaced E3 and it allows us to enjoy the video game festival we host every summer. However, Some of their strategies were very inelegant.. It doesn’t help that it’s halfway between the developers it depends on and the audience it needs. After all, Companies are the ones who invest money with the hope that we will be on the other side, doing our part: the journalists creating the stories, making the videos, and the public watching the broadcast.

Who pays and how much to participate in the Summer Game Fest?

Middle Esquire prepared a report on Summer Game Fest. In it, they explain, among other things, how the entertainment business model presented by Geoff Keighley works. “These events are terribly expensive.”– An anonymous source told them. They then added the following: “According to pricing information provided to me by several marketers who prefer to remain anonymous, it costs $250,000 to have your trailer featured in the Summer Game Fest main event if it lasts one minute, and $350,000 if it lasts one and a half and one and a half minutes.” $550,000 in two and a half minutes. I was also told that last year’s Game Awards edition was in the same price range.”

This information, although correct, requires further clarification. Not all companies pay for showing their trailers. He Summer Games Festival and the Game Awards need great games to be attractive. People watch it with the hope that Elden Ring will appear at the end of the show and announce the release date, as happened in 2021. It wouldn’t make sense for companies to pay to make Geoff Keighley’s product even more attractive. In this sense, we must take into account some exceptions. For example, if one day they announced Elden Ring 2, it’s very hard to think that FromSoftware or Bandai Namco (if they were the publisher again) would have to pay.

A report to Kotaku adds additional information on this matter: “The money spent on the Summer Game Fest presentation event trailer also includes a certain number of publications on the official SGF social networks. One minute implies one post, one and a half two and two minutes three. Not all trailers shown are paid . “editorial gaps” and they are added for free. Typically, they are reserved for major announcements from large companies such as Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Part of what other small developers pay is probably due to the opportunity keep playing these great games and the looks they attract.

It must be taken into account that Summer Game Fest is not only what we see on streams the day it started. Also part of the event will be numerous exclusive video game presentations for press and content creators that will take place in the following days, or small “streams” dedicated to independent games, for which the economic barrier to entry is very low. In general, returning to the topic of money: if you had doubts about the profitability of the project, you can let them go. While this is a somewhat rough estimate, if we only take last year’s trailers into account, we can estimate some income about 9.5 million dollars.

Nevertheless Looks like Summer Game Fest is worth it for developers. Complaints reflected in various reports about this event relate to very high costs that many companies cannot afford. However, those companies that can pay for it are happy. In the end, both this presentation and the Game Awards show better audience figures every year.

In 3D games | All video game conferences in summer 2024. Dates, start times, confirmed games and more..

In 3D games | The Great Dilemma of Video Games and Generation Z: Despite the industry’s efforts, young people are reluctant to buy the PS5 and Xbox Series..