Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards have become a gaming staple, and now he’s announced a new event that will help fill the void left by this year’s canceled conferences. The Summer Game Fest (official website), organized by Keighley, will be a four-month-long, all-digital celebration. Some major publishers have already signed on to participate in the festival, which will feature exclusive announcements, in-game events, and playable content.
Summer Game Fest will run from May to August and is set to be a loose assembly of presentations from major publishers. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Keighley stated that while the transition to digital events was accelerated by current events, he thinks the industry was headed that way anyway.
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Earlier this year Keighley bowed out of hosting the E3 Coliseum, and now that he’s hosting his own show in the vacuum of the year’s biggest gaming event he’s given some insight on why he made that decision:
I just didn’t feel confident that the show was going to best represent the industry, and honestly, what I pitched to E3 initially was something that was more digital and global, because that’s where I wanted to see things go anyways.
Keighley envisions that aside from significant conferences, he envisions events surrounding one particular game. This is a stark contrast from the traditional format of hardware and software studios dropping everything at once. This means that upcoming titles that may have been edged out by bigger names will get the coverage they deserve instead of just being seconds-long blurbs between major trailers.
Some big names in gaming have already signed on, and we can expect more to be announced before the event starts in June:
- 2K
- Activision
- Bandai Namco
- Bethesda
- Blizzard
- CD Projekt Red
- Digital Extremes
- EA
- Microsoft
- Sony
- Square Enix
- Private Division
- Riot Games
- Steam
- Warner Bros.
No specific details on what Summer Game Fest will entail have been released. However, the official announcement states that we can expect studios to drop details on their individual events in the coming weeks.
