Summer Game Fest 2021 Kickoff & Schedule Announced

Summer Game Fest 2021 has announced its global kickoff event, Kick Off Live. The show will get started just a bit before E3 next month. This opening event will include a number of game announcements and several live performances as well.

Summer Game Fest 2021 Kickoff & Schedule Announced

E3 is just around the corner, but Summer Games Fest 2021 has just announced that its global opening event will start before that. The Kick Off Live event will begin on June 10th at 2:00pm ET (11:00am PT). That puts the Geoff Keighley hosted kickoff show 2 days ahead of E3’s June 12th start. The kickoff will be followed by several publisher events over the following week, some of which are also part of E3:

  • June 12: Ubisoft Forward – 3:00pm ET / 12:00pm PT
  • June 16: Steam Next Fest – 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT
  • June 22: EA Play Live – TBA

Geoff Keighley is also well-known for hosting The Game Awards annual shows. Though E3 is the big event of June, he wanted to put something new in that period of time. So last year he created Summer Game Fest, to bring a lot of different shows, announcements, and even some of his own stuff together in one place.

 

In an interview with gameindustry.biz, Geoff Keighley talked about a number of things, from Summer Game Fest, to the overall state of the video game industry, indie games, and more. He made the following comments about the Summer Game Fest 2021 event itself:

“The idea is that we will have a big kick-off show this year. Everything last year was so spread apart by nature of the pandemic. And the feedback from everyone is that they want these games shows all together. So, now we are going to just do a big full-on show for Summer Games Fest that leads into the big publisher events. Which is hopefully more of what people wanted, where things are more condensed and combined together. So people have a date and a time to show up for news. That’s what we are going for.”

When asked about the future of Summer Game Fest and other shows, he said he’d love to go back to having some parts of the show be physical again, but for now the events have to remain digital-only due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the Summer Game Fest 2021 partners list.

This is the Summer Game Fest 2021 partners list.

They also touched on the pandemic a bit more deeply and discussed its ongoing effects on the games industry. Geoff Keighley was asked about this and what people should expect going into June, as far as big announcements and what the gaming community should expect. In short, he said we should keep our expectations in check:

“There is definitely good stuff this summer. There are big games coming this fall like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, Horizon… But generally, games last year… it was easier to finish them when they’re almost done, versus ones that were in mid-development. I think overall people should manage expectations, and that’s just like a general note for everyone on the internet.

There has certainly been lots of delays across the industry. There will be good stuff, but yes, you know this, things are just taking a bit longer with the work-from-home scenarios. It will be a good June. All the publishers will have some news to share. But it’ll be more Gamescom and The Game Awards when the bigger stuff will be shown.”

Summer Game Fest 2021 is starting just before E3, and also lasts much longer than that event. June is going to be a big month, and hype is growing as it inches ever closer. [wpdiscuz-feedback id=”ul51su47ef” question=”What are you most excited to hear about next month?” opened=”1″]What are you most excited to hear about next month?[/wpdiscuz-feedback]

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

×