Video Games

Opening Night Live is reportedly hiking up its timeslot prices for 2025

Publishers will have to reach deeper into their wallets

Marco Wutz

Koelnmesse / Gamescom / Marvin Ruppert

While we are looking forward to The Game Awards 2024 with all its new announcements, the first preparations for another Geoff Keighley show are already underway – Opening Night Live will return in 2025 to kick off next year’s Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.

German website GamesWirtschaft reports that the sale of booths and other partnerships for Gamescom 2025 has begun this week with prices per square meter remaining pretty similar compared to this year’s iteration of the exhibition.

Prices for Opening Night Live, however, appear to be the exception. GamesWirtschaft writes that a 30-second timeslot in the main show will cost €140,000 EUR (around $147,577 USD), which is €25,000 more than in 2024 – an increase of over 17%.

A 3-minute timeslot can be had for €465,000 (around $490,167) in 2025, according to the report.

In 2024, only companies with an exhibition space of at least 100sqm or an alternative investment of at least €60,000 at Gamescom were eligible for purchasing a timeslot at ONL, meaning that a 3-minute slot would cost well above half a million euros under the same conditions in 2025.

Any publishers or indie developers with a global revenue of under €100 million could apply for the limited wildcard slots on the show, which came at no cost – though for that, their content had to be regarded as “very strong” by the organizers. It’s likely that these wildcard slots will once again be available in 2025 as well.

Here is what all possible timeslots for the main show at ONL 2025 will cost:

  • 30 seconds: €140,000 (€115,000 in 2024)
  • 60 seconds: €205,000 (€165,000 in 2024)
  • 90 seconds: €270,000 (€215, 000 in 2024)
  • 120 seconds: €335.000 (€265.000 in 2024)
  • 150 seconds: €400,000 (not listed in 2024)
  • 180 seconds: €465.000 (not listed in 2024)

ONL timeslots usually become available in January and are sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

Opening Night Live 2025 is set for August 19, 2025, with Gamescom taking place from August 20 to 24, 2025.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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