With his choice of opting out of E3, then the eventual cancelation of the industry-wide event, Geoff Keighley has announced a four-month-long festival full of video game news, demos, reveals, and more. Summer Game Fest starts this month and will run until August 24 with Gamescom: Opening Night Live.
Phase One of the line up of publishers includes 2K, Activision, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Blizzard, Bungie, CD Projekt, Digital Extremes, EA, Sony, Private Division, Riot, Square Enix, Steam, Warner Bros. and Microsoft, who have all been announced to feature in the upcoming event. It will spread out unlike E3’s compact few days, meaning more content for us gamers to see by the biggest names in the industry.
“This year has been a challenge for all of us,” Keighley writes. “For a while, I thought 2020 might be the first time in 25 years we didn’t have a big, magic industry-wide moment. It really bummed me out to see everything fracture. More than ever, this is a year we need a positive, uplifting center of gravity to bring this global community together.”
As of writing, Keighley went to Reddit to answer fan questions about the newly announced Summer Game Fest. In response to user iammajorm, who asked when we can expect the conference from Warner, the producer and creator went into detail about how companies will decide when to publish information on upcoming releases.
“Each publisher will decide to share news when they can — and note that we aren’t saying everyone on that list has a “conference” per se, each publisher will likely have different approaches this year to how they communicate news. Many folks may have multiple “beats” across the summer.”
More details will come next Thursday during Inside Xbox, where the world will get to see some games running on the Xbox Series X for the first time. Microsoft’s showcase next week will also feature gameplay of the newly announced Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
You can keep up to date on Keighley and partner iam8bit’s Summer Game Fest website and opt-in for notifications to get the latest news. Plus, we will be writing articles on everything related to the festival.