Report: Appearing at Gamescom Opening Night Live has gotten over 20% more expensive since last year

Gamescom Opening Night Live has quietly become one of the biggest livestreamed events on the gaming calendar after the demise of E3 almost half a decade ago. While Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation still hold their showcases (with plenty of third-party games in them), many publishers have given up holding their own events ala Ubisoft Connect or EA Play Live, as it has become clear it's hard to get eyes on a livestream even if you are one of the biggest publishers out there.

What’s more, many smaller devs and publishers have struggled to get attention as storefronts like Steam and the eShop have become ever more cluttered. This, paired with the fact that there are just a lot of video games being made and released nowadays, means that shows where you can get your game in front of eyeballs have never been more important.

For a few years there, Gamescom had become something of a bastion for mid-sized publishers and games that might not get picked up for co-marketing with a console manufacturer, as it was known to be easier to get into and cheaper than The Game Awards or Summer Game Fest, owing to its generally lower viewership.

However, getting in the show has steadily become more difficult to get into, as the price of getting stage time on the yearly livestream has jumped by over 20% since last year.

Unlike the other shows that Geoff Kiegley presents (like The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest), the cost of getting into the ONL is much easier to find out, as it is advertised publicly by Gamescom itself. In a sales deck slideshow available on Gamescom’s “Exhibitors” section of its website, it can be seen that featuring on the ONL’s main show can cost from €140,000 for 30-second spot, all the way to €465,000 for 180 seconds on the livestream. 

Notably, this is a large jump from last year's numbers, which I shared last year on Twitter. If you break it down, a 30-second tease has gone up in price by 21.7%, 60 seconds has increased by 24.2%, 90 seconds has gone up by 25.5% and a two-minute slot has gone up 26.4% year-over-year, with no prices listed on the page from 2024 about trailers longer than 120 seconds.

It is worth noting that paying to be on ONL isn’t the only way to get on the livestream, as the sales deck differentiates between “Editorial” slots, which are described as “Brand new game announcements and breaking news to drive awareness/audience during the livestream. Without additional costs.” and “Sponsorship” slots that are games that, “[Purchased] in-show time to promote games and initiatives that do not qualify for editorial placement, or games that are about to be released. These sponsorships can include commercials, pre-produced creatives or in-show developer interviews.”

If you are wondering what that means in non-B2B-speak, basically, some games are asked/picked by Gamescom’s editorial team to be on the show, which would likely be the employees of Geoff Keighley’s media business, Gameslice. While other games which the editorial team doesn’t invite on the show can purchase time. 

So the question remains, is it worth the price? 

Well, it's hard to figure out. On the official The Game Awards YouTube channel, Gamescom ONL 2024 is sitting at 2.7m views, while that year's Game Awards is at 14m. That’s a pretty bad case of apples to oranges in terms of comparison, but we can’t really look at ONL’s numbers for 2023’s show for comparison as the VOD has been scrubbed from The Game Awards YouTube account and uploaded in chunks (mostly likely has it was the year a fan stormed the stage demanding GTA 6) and the VODs for 2022 and before are also either cut up or only available in full on non-Gamescom related channels.

If you want to read the sales deck, you can here, as it includes interesting tidbits from the price of floorspace for a booth per square metre and stats on the show's reach, including “547 million video views, with 70.7 million on Gamescom-owned channels”, and how many people were accredited as “media” or “creator” last year