Geoff Keighley, the creator of The Game Awards, is back with a new initiative. This time around, it’s Summer Game Fest. A season of breaking news, announcements, and in-game events. The festival has a lot of free games, reveals and exciting news in the bag. Here’s everything you need to know about Summer Game Fest: Dates, Games, Demos, Publishers, And More –
What is the Summer Game Fest?
Summer Game Fest is a celebration of video games and the industry as a whole during these difficult times. As major events like E3 and Gamescom got canceled, Geoff Keighley, the creator of The Game Awards, came up with the idea of a worldwide gaming festival, which gamers can enjoy from the comfort of their homes. Summer Game Fest is a season of digital video game events from publishers, select playable content, in-game events, and more to be announced.
Schedule, Dates, and Duration
Summer Game Fest has already started! The festival has been divided into phases. How many in total? We don’t know yet. But we have a few details about the first phase. Geoff comments, “It’s four months of events that start this month, and the finale is the big Gamescom show I will do on August 24. We are just supporting/amplifying each publisher’s individual events.”
Phase 1
Phase 1 runs from May till August of 2020. Here’s the list of all the publishers involved in Phase 1 –
- 2K Games
- Activision
- Bandai Namco
- Bethesda
- Blizzard
- Bungie
- CD Projekt Red
- Digital Extremes
- EA
- PlayStation
- Private Division
- Riot Games
- Square Enix
- Steam
- Warner Bros
- Xbox
Phase 2
There will be a Phase 2, which Geoff Keighley himself confirmed during a Reddit AMA session. He wrote, “Phase 1 refers to the publishers — there will be a phase 2 with more publishers added. The Phase doesn’t mean a specific time period really for the events.”
More Phases
Talking about more phases, Geoff wrote, “There will be more phases of partner announcements to come, yes.”
Schedule
When will the specific schedule for Summer Game Fest’s phase 1 be announced? Geoff says, “On a rolling basis.” “They will be revealed as publishers are ready to share their dates — and we’ll have a schedule on the website that launches on Tuesday,” he adds.
Games – What Can We Expect
Currently, Summer Game Fest has not revealed any details on the games we can expect. Of course, there would be the big titles like Cyberpunk 2077 from CDPR, The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima from PlayStation and Valorant from Riot. We don’t know, however, what publishers like Warner Bros and Square Enix have in mind.
It might be finally time Warner Bros reveal their top-secret project everyone’s been waiting for. Maybe a new Batman game? Who knows! Only time will tell.
Demos
“There will be playable content, and maybe some big surprises,” Geoff writes. “There are also things like alpha and betas on big games. I would not expect that every major game is going to be doing a demo for you — maybe eventually, but also let’s be realistic about the world we are in right now. Work from home is challenging for studios and they need to finish their games too. But I see a day when yes, all major games have playable trailers or slices.”
How To Watch
You can watch streams all over the internet – YouTube, Twitch, Mixer, TikTok, etc. Plus, to stay updated, follow Summer Game Fest on Facebook and Instagram as well.
Will Nintendo Be A Part of Summer Game Fest?
Currently, Nintendo is not a part of the festival. The company, however, is always welcome on board. Geoff says, “Nintendo is always welcome!”
Will Reggie Be A Part?
Geoff says, “I was texting with Reggie yesterday and we were talking about some ideas. We’ll see, I’d love to get him involved. I’m going o be on his new podcast with the New York Critics Circle soon.”
Will Ubisoft Be A Part?
From what it seems, currently, Ubisoft has no interest in participating. Their plans, however, might change once the festival catches up and gets attention among gamers. Although Ubisoft isn’t directly involved in Phase 1, we’ll see Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla gameplay, thanks to Xbox, next week. And Xbox’s event is indeed a part of the Summer Game Fest.
How Will Publishers Communicate?
In the words of Geoff, “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.”
Convincing Publishers For Summer Game Fest
Convincing publishers is not an easy job. And as Geoff says, it “took time”. “Well it was an ongoing conversation,” Geoff writes. “I only really wanted to do this if we could get full alignment from all the game publishers and platforms around a central idea. And that took time, especially given the current global pandemic. I wanted to be sensitive to everyone’s current situation. But yeah, it’s not easy getting all the companies to align around one idea….there are always days when it feels like it’s falling apart, or difficult conversations to have with people. But all that matters is that we got there, and that’s the best thing for the industry and its fans.”
Idea Behind Summer Game Fest
Many of us were curious about this. Did the pandemic lead to the introduction of the Summer Game Fest? Or was it already planned? To clear our confusion, Geoff wrote, “COVID-19 accelerated the plans, but the idea of doing a big global, digital, the interactive festival has always been a dream of mine. We sort of started this last year around TGA with The Game Festival.”
That’s right. Last year, while The Game Awards were live, Steam offered free demos of the games that were announced at the awards show. This allowed gamers at home a chance to try out games in real-time, making it a more interactive show overall.
To further add to the story, iam8bit wrote, “iam8bit has been working with Geoff for years and we’ve always been looking for ways to build something bigger, cooler, crazier. Obviously it’s been a strange time for the gaming industry these past few months but necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.”
Currently, Summer Game Fest is planned only for 2020. It’d be the response and people’s love which will help the organizers decide whether to extend the festival for another year and beyond.
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