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Good news! Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest megamix is going to be a much more condensed affair than last year’s months-long relay of game announcements, clocking in at just four days for the core event. Phew. We already knew the event was going to kick off on June 9th, but Keighley has now revealed that the bulk of the announcements will be done and dusted by Sunday June 12th. And breathe…
E3 2022 proper was cancelled completely back in March, but with GeoffFest now seemingly coalescing around other confirmed showcases, including the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase and Future’s PC Gaming Show (which are both scheduled for June 12th), this year’s video games Christmas should hopefully feel a bit more like E3s of yore. At least in theory, anyway.
“I think everything’s going to be really compact within a matter of weeks as the industry sort of represents itself to the wider world in June, with everyone sort of doing events,” Keighley told the Epic Games Store.
“I know there’s a prevailing sentiment that everyone likes everything kind of packed in two days, or three days, or something like that. But that’s really hard to do because companies want to own specific days. So, I don’t know if we’re ever gonna go back to that old model of everything being sort of compacted into just a couple of days.”
The date for this year’s Summer Game Fest was announced last week, along with the revelation that the event will be broadcast to IMAX cinemas in the UK, US and Canada. I quite like the idea of settling back with a ridiculously large bucket of whatever cola’s on tap down the Gateshead IMAX and watching Geoff’s giant face reveal 2023’s games line-up like some kind of Kojima-obsessed Wizard of Oz. The Game Awards is doing the same thing in December too.
The Geoffster also spoke about how Summer Game Fest will focus on developers outside of the traditional Western batch this year, too.
“There’s a lot of teams in Ukraine where we hear about games being developed there. They can’t finish their trailer because the studio has to relocate to a new country due to the war. It’s very real. One of the ways that what’s going on in the world impacts game development. We’ve been thinking about that and I think you’ll see some of that kind of representation in our show in some interesting ways to talk about the global state of game development and who the people are making these games.
More info on Summer Game Fest is over on their site, with a potted history of the past two years of shows. To E3 or not E3, that is the question.