With E3 being canceled this year, and many unsure if it will ever return, the summer was in danger of being a wild west of every publisher and developer creating their own events and announcements with no rhyme or reason. For all the faults with it, E3 at least organized all the major players in the gaming space into some sort of order that everyone — players and press — could keep track of and plan around based on their interests.
In the vacuum left by that iconic summer event full of press conferences, Geoff Keighley has stepped up in the past few years to introduce a new system to maintain order during the summer announcements.
Summer Game Fest is quite different from Keighley’s longer-running, more established Game Awards held in December. Each year has looked slightly different, but as the summer looms closer, more and more details about how this year’s Summer Game Fest will unfold are being announced. This is shaping up to be the event of the year for gamers, so we rounded up everything you need to know about Summer Game Fest so you can catch all the exciting news, announcements, and more.
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What is Summer Game Fest?
Summer Game Fest is the creation of game industry legend Geoff Keighley that, in his words, is “the world’s first fully digital, global celebration of video games.” He has been personally running this event every year since 2020 in an attempt to give publishers and developers a way to showcase their projects to the world in an organized and professional way. Summer Game Fest kicks off with a live showcase hosted by Keighley that features announcements and game reveals. Last year’s kickoff event included the very first gameplay shown for Elden Ring, a reveal of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and even Jeff Goldblum appearing to announce Jurassic World Evolution 2. That event will then be followed over the course of the summer by a series of streams prepared by developers and publishers to show off new games, give updates on ones scheduled to launch or make any other major announcements.
The first Summer Game Fest was more of an organizational tool to use to track when each publisher was hosting their own showcases, and technically ran from May all the way until August, but 2021 managed to condense these between the months of June and July and featured nearly all the biggest names in the industry, including Microsoft, Nintendo, and Ubisoft.
When is Summer Game Fest?
Get ready!!@IMAX is teaming us with us for #SummerGameFest on June 9 and @TheGameAwards in December!
That’s right: Watch all the reveals, surprises and announcements with your friends in select IMAX theaters for full-scale immersion :)
This is going to be cool! IMAX LIVE! pic.twitter.com/dvQPIgqF09
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 5, 2022
Announced via Twitter, Summer Game Fest 2022 will kick off with a live show on June 9. Summer Game Fest Live as this showcase is called, will be streamed that Thursday beginning at 11 a.m. PT and will include a “cross-industry showcase with announcements, reveals, and more.” Aside from watching it in your own home, Summer Game Fest has also partnered with IMAX to screen this opening event in select theaters. We don’t know for how long this initial livestream will be as of yet. According to the official website, while not all dates are set, so far the only scheduled events are in June.
After this live event, the next digital showcase planned as part of Summer Game Fest will be the Tribeca Games Spotlight on June 10 at noon PT, followed by the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase on June 12 at 10 a.m. PT.
More partners and digital events are expected to be announced as the event approaches, so we’ll keep you updated here with any new additions.
How to watch
You can watch Summer Game Fest 2022 on all major streaming services, including Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter. Or, if available near you, you can watch Summer Game Fest Live at an IMAX theater.
What can we expect to see?
So far, there have been no real clues as to what exactly we can expect to see at this year’s Summer Game Fest. However, a list of all the partners currently confirmed to be a part of the event in some form is listed. Going alphabetically, the list includes:
- 2K
- Activision
- Amazon Games
- Annapurna
- Blizzard
- Capcom
- Devolver
- Dotemu
- EA
- Epic Games
- Finji
- Frontier
- Gearbox
- Hi-Rez
- Innersloth
- Koch Media
- Mediatonic
- MiHoYo
- Bandai Namco
- Netflix
- Psyonix
- Raw Fury
- Riot Games
- Saber
- Sega
- Sony
- Prime Gaming
- Square Enix
- Steam
- Tencent Games
- Tribeca Festival
- Ubisoft
- Warner Bros.
- Wizards of the Coast
- Xbox
Big names we expect to have some major announcements to make from that list include Sony, Xbox, Capcom, Sega, Square Enix, and hopefully a few surprises as well. Since Xbox and Bethesda are the only major ones to have a scheduled conference of their own so far, right now we can only really count on them having a good amount of stuff to show.
