Affected by the notorious COVID-19, E3, one of the world’s biggest annual gaming festival, has confirmed to be called off this year. Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, has long been an exciting occasion where fans worldwide can anticipate world premier trailers or gameplays from video game companies, especially big ones with huge budgets and popular titles. Now that the biggest medium in the world is gone, where could the companies, big and small, find another ideal channel to present their babies, and where can we gamers look at all those delicious trailers and gameplays?
As though hearing our desperate prayers, the producer of The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley arose with his newest creation, Summer Game Fest, bringing hope to the dark land of the gaming community.
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Geoff Keighley, the Creator of The Game Awards
If you aren’t familiar with this gentleman, he is a Canadian video game journalist and then host for Spike Video Game Awards from 2003-2013; he left SVG to start his own show, now widely successful The Game Awards, in 2014. The Game Awards annually recognizes games achieving technical and creative excellence released within that year. The highlight of the show, “Game of the Year,” is without a doubt the most anticipated award of the night, and marks the gaming icon for the year. With The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley aims to create a gaming equivalent of the Academy Awards, which also takes pride in being a massive celebration of video game achievements for all gamers worldwide.
3A Gaming Publishers Join the Show
The first thing to be excited about Summer Games Fest is the strong alliance SGF has formed with the renowned gaming companies including EA, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, Riot Games, Blizzard, CD Projekt RED and more, giving us a promising outlook for its content ahead.
What to Expect from Summer Game Fest
Thanks to the pandemic, the show will be streamed online only, and free for everyone to watch. Different from conventional schedules followed by events like E3, Summer Game Fest holds event throughout the entire summer——from May to August 2020. Sounds a lot, eh? But SGF doesn’t go live every day. Instead, the events——so far only 8 of them——are scattered over the course of 4 months. So there is a little something every few days, just soon enough to keep us hyped, but spaced far enough not to get us overwhelmed, as I like to interpret it.
Below is the scheduled content: (updated May, 26 1:00 AM)
May
June
July
August
Playable Content Is on the Way
According to its official website, we can expect some playable content along the way. It is said that the content could be in alpha, beta, or demo, and will be available on Steam, Xbox, and more which are yet to be announced. In tandem with Summer Game Fest, Steam has announced its Steam Game Festival from June 6 – 14, which will offer limited-time demos or short playable experiences of games coming soon on the platform. Gamers out there can save the date and look forward to the playable content.
So far, we’ve only seen two of SGF events and I’ve been blown away, and there’s much more new content coming soon! With a line-up this strong, it’s really hard to get your hopes down. But whether it will be a legit E3 successor or an embarrassing flop all comes down to the content ahead.
Michael Chuang 