Geoff Keighley Brightens up Our Pandemic With Summer Game Fest
Summer Game Fest can't replace E3, but in some ways, it will be better. | Source: YouTube
- Today, Geoff Keighley announced a summer-long interactive gaming event dubbed Summer Game Fest.
- The festival will feature news, announcements, in-game events, free playable demos, and more.
- Confirmed participants include PlayStation, Xbox, Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, EA, Riot Games, and more.
With E3 out of the picture this year, The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley is here to ensure everyone gets their annual dose of summer video games goodness.
Today, Keighley announced Summer Game Fest .
Summer Game Fest
As an obvious stopgap for the now-canceled E3, the summer-long industry-wide celebration of gaming aims to rustle up a selection of announcements, breaking news, in-game events, panels, interviews, and free playable content from a broad selection publishers and developers.
Summer Game Fest is teaming up with creative production company iam8bit – the very same company initially slated to organize this year’s E3 before bowing out prematurely – as creative director.
Keighley will take on hosting duties while also curating and producing content. Broadcasts will stream live on the usual gaming haunts such as YouTube, Mixer, Twitch, and the like.
A new website created to mark the announcement reads :
Bringing the world together to celebrate video games from the comfort of home. Summer Game Fest is a season of digital video game events from publishers, select playable content, in-game events, and more to be announced.
Summer Game Fest will run for four months starting this month and culminating in a big finale during the Geoff Keighley-hosted Gamescom: Opening Night Live on Aug. 24. A full schedule will be available on the festival’s dedicated web site soon.
A Stacked Lineup
As it stands, Keighley has revealed 2K Games, Activision, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Blizzard, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Digital Extremes, EA, PlayStation, Private Division, Riot Games, Square Enix, Steam, Warner Bros., and Xbox as participants.
Not a bad lineup by anyone’s standards and one that resembles what you’d expect at E3. Or possibly even better: Keighley has managed to draft in Sony. The Japanese company was on track to miss the LA convention for the second year running.
Summer Game Fest will act as an umbrella banner under which participating developers and publishers will host their respective digital events. As such, we can expect Summer Game Fest content as well as digital events directly from game makers.
To mimic the hands-on experience of a brick and mortar gaming convention, the festival will offer limited-time playable demos of upcoming games. As it stands, both Xbox and Steam have signed up to host playable festivals .
The Summer Game Fest is more than we could have hoped for, given the ongoing pandemic. A tip of the hat to Keighley for succeeding in bringing a stacked roster of developers and publishers together.
