Geoff Keighley’s latest pet project, the Summer Game Fest, finally has a date for this year—June 9, 2022.
The newfound showcase first emerged in 2020 after the collapse of E3 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. E3 2021 came as a soft digital event, but was a smaller, digital-only event that functioned similarly to that of the format of Summer Games Fest. However, it didn’t make anywhere near as big as a splash as the latter.
E3 2022 was officially cancelled earlier this year, following on-going trials that the ESA (the organization behind E3) has been faced with for some time now. In the wake of E3 2022 being outright cancelled, Summer Games Fest will now stand as the premiere gaming news showcase for the summer.
Like the traditional format of E3, this year’s Summer Game Fest will feature events from a variety of big publishers and studios, including Xbox, SEGA, 2K, Activision, Ubisoft and more.
So far, there are two announced and confirmed showcase events — the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on June 12 (1 PM EST/10 AM PST) and the Tribeca Games Spotlight on June 10 (3 PM EST and 12 PM PST). More announcements (such as Nintendo, presumably) should follow within the coming weeks.
As Geoff Keighley himself mentions in his tweet about the new event, he will be hosting a “live cross-industry showcase. Game announcements, reveals + Day of the Devs.” He invites show-goers to keep checking the Summer Game Fest website, alongside its social pages, for incoming updates.
With the future of E3 still uncertain, it seems that Summer Game Fest will serve as its de facto replacement should the ESA not be able to fully revitalize its efforts. After all, 2021 proved, it is rather odd to have two large showcase events within months of each other.
Summer has always traditionally been a big news time for gaming thanks to E3, but spreading announcements across two events is not viable in a lot of cases.
