TGA 2025: How Much Does a Trailer or a Seat Cost?

Here we are: the evening of The Game Awards 2025 has arrived. In a few hours, the doors of the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles will open to welcome the public and VIP guests for the event organized and presented by Geoff Keighley, now recognized as the Oscars night of video games, as well as the most important annual showcase available to software houses to announce or display upcoming titles.

But how much does all this fuss cost? Not a little, and the figures that teams and developers shell out to have their place on stage or in the audience during the event are also high. What essentially started as a celebratory event has in fact transformed into a money-eating machine with investments that are nothing short of millions.

TGA 2025: The Cost of a Trailer

Unfortunately, we don't have the event's price list in hand, but on the pages of Kotaku, colleague Alyssa Mercante reported rather reliable figures, as confirmed by two different internal sources within the organization. According to these rumors, we learn that a 60-second trailer can cost up to $450,000, while a 3-minute one can exceed one million. Obviously, there will also be shorter and cheaper segments, but still with costs about four times higher than the Opening Night Live of the Summer Game Fest.

It must be said that these figures are not precise and also depend on the block of the event in which the trailer is shown: it is quite intuitive, in fact, that the first 3-5 titles presented enjoy a privileged and therefore more expensive position, as do those released at the end of the evening immediately before the nomination of the Game of The Year (which should arrive around 5 AM Italian time). Furthermore, even among the trailers, some enjoy the privilege of being "invited": we are talking about those highly anticipated games for which Keighley and associates offer a free time slot just to have them during the show.

TGA 2025: The Fight for Seats

A similar discussion applies to seating in the audience, aisle, balcony, or other areas of the theater: obviously, the creators of the nominated titles are entitled to some reserved seats, as are the main authorities of the industry and a limited number of press members – and Mercante herself states that she did not receive a ticket, despite her decade of experience. For everyone else, the struggle is terrible: the Peacock Theatre offers 7100 seats, but it's easy to see how many of these disappear at lightning speed, purchased by the software houses themselves to allow access to other industry professionals.

This is the case, for example, of Sandfall Interactive, the team behind the multi-nominated Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which, in order to bring the entire team to Los Angeles, bought a large number of tickets, reportedly paying $300 each. But we are still in the realm of tickets sold at a "controlled" price to industry professionals: a private citizen who wanted to attend the event would have to shell out figures ranging from $450 to over $1000 [the latter, in reality, from classic touts or scalpers, as they are called].

All this information should naturally be taken with the benefit of the Rumor, given that the TGA organization has not commented on any of this. The only two certainties are that tonight's show will do everything to attract media attention and that all this splendor has its cost...