Last year, in the place of a then-missing E3 trade show, Geoff Keighley organized another gaming-centric showcase for the summer of 2020. Alongside an all digital Game Awards event at the end of last year, Keighley's team introduced Summer Game Fest, an all-digital showcase of game reveals, interviews, and more throughout mid-2020. Unlike E3, which is generally centralized to a little over a week, Summer Game Fest took place over multiple separate events spread throughout June and July. Despite the bevy content spread across the season, Keighley expressed a desire to "condense" the show a bit more, thus Summer Game Fest is much more concise this year.
In 2021, rather than spread the show's events and partnerships across multiple months, Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is comparatively much shorter and focused. Along with partnerships with existing showcases like Ubisoft Forward and the Xbox-Bethesda Showcase, this year's Summer Game Fest kicks off this June and lasts until mid-to-late July. During that time, Summer Game Fest will kick off its own introduction event at the beginning of this month, followed by announcements in between. There are likely additional announcements to be had, but there's already a pretty clear schedule of events happening for Summer Game Fest thus far.
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First and foremost, the big kick off event for Summer Game Fest is next Thursday, June 10 (11 a.m. PT, 2 p.m. ET), where the festival will actually begin. Already, Geoff Keighley has hinted at a ton of interesting announcements, along with some additional pomp and circumstance like a Weezer live performance. More specifically, there will be new game reveals, additional showcases of known upcoming titles, as well hints of what's to come in the partnered showcases as well. Summer Game Fest recently confirmed a slew of developers and publishers, big and small, will have things to share; Xbox and more interestingly PlayStation are confirmed for Summer Game Fest.
Bigger publishers like EA, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Activision Blizzard, 2K Games, and more also have a confirmed presence for Summer Game Fest. Keighley also confirmed that, similar to last year, Day of the Devs will also be a part of the June 10 stream with a digital segment. Double Fine and Iam8bit will be partnering with Summer Game Fest to show off a ton of indie projects alongside the larger game announcements. Previously, Day of the Devs has been the source for several incredible breakout indie games and much-hyped indie projects, ranging from titles like Ghostrunner to Sea of Stars.
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As for scheduled events in the far future, Summer Game Fest is largely partnered with several already-announced showcases, as well as some recently announced ones as well. It's important to note that additional announcements could be made this week for the event on June 10, as well as additional shorter streams interspersed throughout the existing schedule. That being said, the future schedule is largely set in stone because numerous showcases coincide with the E3 schedule as well.
The first event outside of Summer Game Fest's kick off event on June 10 is the Koch Media Primetime showcase on June 11 (12 p.m. PT, 3 p.m. ET), which has proven to be the most vague announcement of all so far. A showcase is coming on June 11 by Deep Silver's parent company via a Twitch stream simply titled "We Know Something You Don't Know," which is simultaneously intriguing and unnecessarily ominous. On the flip side, video game media outlet IGN has prepared its own IGN Expo on June 11 as well (1 p.m. PT, 4 p.m. ET)
After that is back-to-back partnered showcases from already announced events. First up is Ubisoft Forward on June 12 (12 p.m. PT, 3 p.m. ET), which is primed to provide a ton of reveals for future Ubisoft titles, presumably outside of the near future like the recently showcased Far Cry 6. After that is the Xbox-Bethesda showcase on June 13 (10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET), which was already confirmed and announced officially by Microsoft early last week. Then there's Steam's Next Fest showcase, Valve's rebranded Steam Game Festival for demoes and new releases on the PC platform, on June 16 (10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET).
Summer Game Fest switches gears to a Sonic the Hedgehog 30th anniversary symphony concert on June 23 (12 p.m. PT, 3 p.m ET). Then, later on in July is EA Play Live, taking place on July 22 with showtimes TBA.
Additional showtimes could be announced in the next week, but so far, this is the current Summer Game Fest schedule as June rolls around. Some of these events were already announced previously, but Geoff Keighley and his team of event organizers have kept some secrets previously, so June 10 could be bigger than expected. As the week rolls on, perhaps Keighley will have more to announce for the upcoming summer of game announcements, especially when sharing the spotlight with E3 this year.