It's scary to think what that "Squad Busters" trailer on Keighley's Summer Game Fest show must have cost. It's known that the base rate is $250,000 per minute, and that trailer was an indulgent four full minutes -- a cool million dollars just in airtime alone.
Nevermind the cost of hiring Ken Jeong, Christina Ricci, Chris Hemsworth, Will Arnett, and Dolph Lungren. Maybe more, too, but those are the only faces I was able to pick out. It's possible that trailer, which is for a bland as hell mobile game, cost upwards of $5,000,000 all put together.
Or to put it another way, that mobile game dev spent as much money for SGF promotional material as some indie devs spend on an entire project. Heck, for some of us, a budget of $5 mil is opulent. That's enough to comfortably run a full-time 5-person development team for, what, 3 years?
And they blew it on the most obnoxious four minutes I've seen at one of these things in years.
