If you’ve ever wondered how much it costs to have trailers shown during Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards the answer is… a lot.
There are a number of reasons why the E3 expo is no more but one of the most important is simply that publishers didn’t want to pay for it anymore. Creating a massive themed booth, that generally only industry professionals got to see, was hugely expensive and even before the pandemic they’d had enough.
E3 might be dead but its legacy lives on, given that the livestreams that have replaced it still take place at roughly the same time of year, i.e. this weekend with the Summer Game Fest.
But it turns out that the event, run by The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley, may not be saving them all that much money, as a two-and-a-half-minute trailer apparently costs $550,000 (£430,000) to run.
Supposedly, a one minute trailer costs a quarter of a million dollars (£1950,000) and a two minute one $450,000 (£352,000). Presumably you get some kind of discount if it’s longer but that is a lot of money.
By comparison the most expensive ad space in the world is during the Superbowl, when 30 seconds of screentime can cost up to $7 million (£5.5 million).
The fact that the amounts are in any way comparable is a bit of a shock, but last year’s Summer Game Fest had a peak viewership of 2.03 million viewers. And since publishers can guarantee they’re almost all keen gamers, getting their attention for those precious minutes is arguably worth the price.
Surprisingly, despite being even more popular – with a peak audience of 3.6 million and a total of 118 million people tuning in at some point – the rates for The Game Awards 2023 were apparently the same.
The Summer Game Fest info comes from unnamed insiders speaking to Esquire, with one helpfully pointing out that, ‘These show are really f***ing expensive.’
It’s easy imagine that if prices continue to increase then publishers may begin to fall out of love with the event, just as they did with E3, but there’s little sign of that so far.
Rumours suggest that, despite running its own State of Play event last week, Sony is planning to reveal a Lego Horizon game at Summer Game Fest.
It could easily have done that during the State of Play but if it’s true that it’s choosing to do it during a multiformat show instead then Sony, and others, must feel it’s worth the extra money.
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