Summer Game Fest tried to replace E3, but The Game Awards did it better

Geoff Keighley set out to replace E3, but the trouble is he already did that

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In the event, E3's death throes were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 show was canceled, and E3 never really came back: there was a dreadful virtual event format in 2021, and a couple more false starts. Keighley saw this coming, and as early as 2020 started spinning up his proposed alternative, Summer Game Fest, focused on online trailer showcases but with a small in-person component for press.

Summer Game Fest has stuck, and is now the name most everyone uses to refer to the vestigial ghost of E3 that the game community refuses to relinquish: a week in June stuffed with announcements and previews, a shop window for the industry, and a hype fest for fans. But Summer Game Fest isn't really the new E3. By its nature, it can't be. What's more, when it comes to all-encompassing game showcases, Keighley is his own biggest competition.

The issues are twofold. Keighley has kept a flag planted in June in a way many in the industry find useful, but he's the only real stakeholder in Summer Game Fest (as opposed to E3, which was organized by industry body the Entertainment Software Association). Everyone else will serve their own best interests, notably the Big Three platform holders — PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. And the Big Three have all decided that they like making announcements close to each other, but not too close.

The center cannot hold. Sony typically presents its June State of Play a few days before the Summer Game Fest stream, Xbox a few days after, and Nintendo usually goes later in the month. Nominally, none of them have anything to do with Summer Game Fest, and they hold both it and each other at arm's length (unlike the breathless 36-hour rush of E3 press conferences in the old days). They also keep all the best stuff for themselves, including the biggest announcements from third-party publishers. The actual Summer Game Fest stream can never muster quite the same wattage, and the effect of the whole thing is dissipated.

The second issue is that the starkest current contrast with this rather diffuse hype-fest is organized by Keighley himself. The Game Awards began in 2014, but Keighley had been involved in many of its precursors; with determination and focus, he has built it into a fixture of the game industry's year. Taking place in December — exactly as far away from June as it's possible to get — The Game Awards owns its spot in the calendar completely. It's the only show that can rival the Big Three's showcases for the impact of its announcements; indeed, all three of them often take part.

It's simply not possible to do something this monumental in June. The legacy of E3 has been carved up. Keighley has done well to grab himself a slice of it, but he's not the only one, and the result feels less than the sum of its parts — especially when you stack it up against the E3 competitor Keighley already built at the other end of the year.

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