48-Hour Digital Game Festival to Run Alongside The Game Awards

• Geoff Keighley announces The Game Festival.
• Digital consumer events runs alongside The Game Awards.
• Demos of 13 unreleased games available on Steam for 48 hours.

The Game Awards founder and host, Geoff Keighley, announced today a 48-hour digital consumer event to run alongside Thursday’s live awards ceremony.

The Game Festival

Dubbed The Game Festival, the event runs for 48 hours, starting on Thursday at 10 am PT until Saturday at 10 am PT.

In a Medium post introducing The Game Festival, Keighley explains:

The Game Festival is a first-of-its-kind digital consumer event that brings the magic of hands-on game play demos to fans around the world. For 2019, The Game Festival will launch a digital pilot program on Steam. The Game Festival will feature more than a dozen first-look game demos, available to play for a limited 48-hour window before they are removed from Steam.

To be exact, The Game Festival features 13 unreleased titles which are:

• System Shock (Nightdive Studios)
• Eastward (Pixpil/Chucklefish)
• Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus)
• Moving Out (SMG Studio/Devm Games/Team17)
• Röki (Polygon Treehouse/United Label)
• Chicory (Greg Lobanov)
• Wooden Nickel (Brain&Brain)
• Haven (The Game Bakers)
• Heavenly Bodies (2pt Interactive)
• Acid Knife (Powerhoof)
• The Drifter (Powerhoof)
• CARRION (Phobia/Devolver)
• SkateBIRD (Glass Bottom Games)

Bridging the Gap Between Physical Events and the Broader Gaming Community

Keighley says that the idea stemmed from a desire to bring a trade show or live event experience to the global gaming community. He decided the best way to do this was to bring limited-time demos through the power of a digital storefront.

Alongside the demos, Steam will run a special The Game Awards Sale. Although it’s unclear what titles are set to benefit from a discount, we presume nominees and award winners from the live event will feature in the sale.

Geoff Keighley’s latest project is a novel take and given the stacked roster of games, one that should please fans. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that The Game Festival may sow the seeds for other events to follow suit, elegantly bridging the gap between the oft-insular confines of E3 and the broader gaming community.