Gaming showcases are one of the best ways to get your game in front of as many people as possible. The Game Awards, Summer Game Fest, and Gamescom's Opening Night Live are three of the biggest examples (all hosted by Geoff Keighley, funnily enough). Bulkhead, the studio behind upcoming Steam Early Access first-person shooter Wardogs, wanted to get a 60-second trailer in one of these huge showcases.

However, as explained by Bulkhead's CEO Joe Brammer and UI/UX designer Howard Philpott, they were quoted $300,000. Just for a 60-second slot. As a result, the studio decided to create its own showcase instead, dedicated to FPS games, very aptly named The FPS Games Show.

"We obviously needed to get Wardogs out there so we were looking at the calendar for upcoming showcases, and there genuinely weren't that many options," Brammer explained in a separate video, embedded below. "We didn't exactly fancy paying $300,000 for a 60-second slot," replied Philpott. "And the problem is we'd be next to some massive single-player games, you know, celebrity endorsements and all that kind of stuff."

While the pair don't specify exactly which showcase they're referring to, it's highly likely they're talking about Gamescom's Opening Night Live. Wardogs is releasing onto Steam Early Access on Thursday, Sept. 10, and ONL is happening on Tuesday, Aug. 26. They could have been talking about Summer Game Fest if this quoted fee is a few months old, but back then, Wardogs was limited to private playtests with a select few. In terms of timing, that would've likely been too early for Bulkhead to invest in drawing such a big audience.

Interestingly, this is cheaper than the $450,000 fee reported by Kotaku late last year for participating in The Game Awards. That raises a few questions: Is ONL a cheaper showcase? Have the prices somehow gone down over the last eight months? Does the fee differ depending on the game being shown, or the client paying for it? We don't have the answers to any of these, but they make for interesting food for thought.

"We were just playing one of our alpha tests and when we finished, I just rang you and went, 'Hey, I've got this idea: what if we just set up our own show?'" Brammer said. "And that was it. It started with Beautiful Light, then Escape From Tarkov, then Gray Zone Warfare. What we really liked was Ubisoft were like 'can we be a part of this?'. Rainbow Six Siege is a pretty big game, so them wanting to be part of this FPS community… great. How cool is that?"

Notably, The FPS Games Show doesn't have any fees required to be part of it. "No money's been exchanged, this is all just off the passion of we all make and love FPS games right?" explained Philpott. "Yeah, that was the only rule," Brammer elaborated. "The game has to be an FPS and you have to have something exclusive and then everybody wins."

Philpott ended the discussion with a slightly passive dig at some of the more popular events: "It's a proper showcase. No cringey skits or live music, just FPS games from FPS devs for FPS players."

You can tune into The FPS Games Show live on Twitch at 2 p.m. ET on Thursday, Sept. 3, and find out more on the official site.