Image: Moonana / Studio Pixel Punk / Jon Kristinsson / Kotaku
Gamescom is the biggest video game convention in the world and getting your video game trailer in the Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase is expensive, so a bunch of indie games are sharing beautiful GIFs or short videos of their games online for free instead. Here are 17 that look incredible and deserve your attention.
In 2022, a 30-second spot during host Geoff Keighley’s livestream cost roughly $94,000. In 2024, it’s closer to $127,000, based on sponsorship rates viewed by Kotaku. That’s a lot less then Summer Game Fest, which this year charged $250,000 for a one-minute trailer during the live show, though in both events Keighley preserves space for curated picks that get promoted for free. Still, even the standard Gamescom price is way more than most developers can afford to get their game out into the ether and breaking through the rest of the Gamescom trailer blitz.
While Gamescom Opening Night Live had two hours of announcements, updates, and other glimpses of upcoming games, in addition to the ongoing torrent of other news coming out of the weeklong fan expo, a bunch of indie devs have been trying to get eyeballs on their work simply by tweeting it out with the now viral refrain, “Gamescom trailer is more than 100k dollars, so here is a GIF.”
Mullet Madjack maker HAMMER95, whose excellent boomer shooter came out back in May, kicked things off during the Gamescom livestream on Tuesday, but it wasn’t long before tons of other devs joined in with eye-watering GIFs teasing their upcoming projects. Some are games we’ve already heard of and have been featured in past roundups like the 2024 Day of the Devs showcases, while others were neat stuff I’d never even heard of before that will now definitely be on my radar for the rest of the year and heading into 2025. You can click through the above slideshow to see them all.
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