E3 may be dead but the Summer Game Fest is alive and well, and will return to action for 2024 on June 7 with another live-and-livestreamed show happening at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles.
Summer Game Fest 2024 will be a “cross-platform live showcase of game announcements, trailers and more.” Details on who will be there and what they’ll be showing off haven’t been revealed—have to have some surprises, after all—but the show will run for two hours and, as event founder and host Geoff Keighley put it, serve up a “showcase of what’s next for videogames.”
The rise of Summer Game Fest has been quite a thing to see. For nearly 30 years, E3—the Electronic Entertainment Expo—was the preeminent videogame showcase in North America, the one everyone wanted to see. But its dominance began to wane in the mid-2010s due to a mix of rising costs, the growing popularity of livestreaming, and the advent of more consumer-focused events like PAX and, of course, Summer Game Fest.
A move to open the show to the public failed to turn its fortunes around; major publishers began to fall away, and the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 event entirely. An online E3 took place in 2021 but 2022 was another miss, and while organizers promised a comeback for 2023, that too was eventually dropped. Finally, at the end of 2023, E3 was put to rest for good.
Summer Game Fest lands at around the same time E3 used to, but it’s a very different sort of event, envisioned from the beginning as a concentrated, consumer-oriented display meant to be blasted directly into the eyeballs of gamers. As someone who remembers the excitement of the early days of E3—I was never able to attend, but I read about it voraciously in magazines and forums—there’s an element of sadness to its demise, but there’s no question that Summer Game Fest is a far better fit for the very online world that gamers now live in.
Taking place immediately after Summer Game Fest will be Day of the Devs: SGF Edition, a showcase of “more than a dozen incredible games from game developers of all different backgrounds.” Hope you’ve cleared your calendar for the day.
If you’re going to be in LA on the big day and want to attend live, tickets will be available for purchase from Ticketmaster on May 7. If not, you can watch it livestreamed on the platform of your choice—we’ll have details on how and where to watch online as the big event gets closer.
www.pcgamer.com