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Advertising Your Game at The Game Awards Can Cost $1 Million; So Smaller Devs Are Posting Their Trailers “For Free”

December 17th, 2025 - 7:26 PM

Advertising Your Game at The Game Awards Can Cost $1 Million; So Smaller Devs Are Posting Their Trailers “For Free”

Save for perhaps a few poorly received announcements, The Game Awards 2025 boasted an impressive roster of upcoming titles ranging from Triple A to Mid-budget. But amidst the multi-million dollar studio games present at the show, smaller Indie developers, though miraculously competing with the God of War’s and Battlefield’s and scooping up nominations left and right, are faced with a problem. As Kotaku pointed out in their article about the financial details of the event last week, it’s incredibly expensive not only to attend The Game Awards, but also to put your game on the map there. According to them, an advertisement slot running about three minutes in length can cost upwards of $1 million dollars; which can far exceed a game’s entire development costs in some cases. Of course, it’s not like there aren’t other avenues for a small studio to market their game, but The Game Awards would be a massive opportunity for exposure, considering the 2025 event absolutely smashed the record viewership numbers (illustrated below, credit goes to PictureGroup) of something as big as The Super Bowl–which this year had approximately 127 million average viewers.

Indeed, gaming is a gigantic industry nowadays–and as it seems to some, it feels like their games are getting gatekept because of all this money. Recently, an X post by content creator Jake Lucky reiterated the advertisement cost statistic cited above, and kicked off a viral trend on X where in response, indie game developers are posting the trailer for their projects with a tagline closely following: “I didn’t have $1 million for a Game Awards Trailer, so I’m posting mine for free.”

Finished, in development, or available to play in early access–it doesn’t seem like all of these posts are the first time these games are seeing the light of day, but it’s a bandwagon that’s still rolling along nearly a week since Jake Lucky’s post. Arguably, despite the intensive production process, game development is a far more successful democratized medium than something like film–you don’t really see one-person movie projects making it to the Oscars, now do you? But even with the thorough representation indie developers have gotten in the past few Game Awards, this trend demonstrates that not everyone is satisfied, and though the capacity for greatness is sky-high for nearly all who work on games, there’s still some barriers to entry.

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