17 Great Indie Games Vying for the Spotlight at Gamescom

Gamescom is the world’s largest video game trade show, and getting a video game trailer at Gamescom Opening Night Live is expensive, so a bunch of indie games are sharing cool GIFs or short videos of their games online for free instead. Here are 17 trailers that look great and are worth your attention.

In 2022, a 30-second video will be shown during host Jeff Keighley’s live broadcast. It cost about $94,000.In 2024, it will be closer to $127,000, based on the care rates he’s seen. KotakuThis is much less than the Summer Games Festival, which was charged this year. $250,000 for a one-minute trailer During the live show, though, Keighley reserves space at both events for free-to-play selections. However, the standard Gamescom price tag is far higher than most developers can afford to get their game out into the space and break into the rest of the Gamescom advertising campaign.

While the Gamescom opening ceremony contained two hours of announcements, updates, and other glimpses of upcoming games, in addition to the constant stream of other news coming from the week-long fan expo, a group of indie developers were trying to get attention for their work simply by tweeting it with the now-viral phrase, “Gamescom trailer cost over $100k, so here’s a GIF.”

Mullet Madjac HAMMER95 maker, who Excellent Rami Released in May, Things started During the Gamescom livestream on Tuesday, it wasn’t long before we were joined by a bunch of other developers with amazing GIFs teasing their upcoming projects. Some were games we’d already heard about and were featured in previous reports like the 2024 Developer Days trailers, while others were great games I hadn’t heard of before that will definitely be on my radar for the rest of the year and into 2025. You can click through the slideshow above to see them all.