Summer Game Fest Doesn't Just Try Its Best, It Tries Too Hard

Gizmodo

4 hours ago

Half a decade into its life, Summer Game Fest still just can't get out of its own way.
After a PlayStation showcase earlier in the week, the annual video game promo circuit for the summer began in earnest with that two-hour showcase by the name of Summer Game Fest, which had teases, sequels, and wholly new games galore.
Par for the course for SGF and host Geoff Keighley, both of which have endeavored to step up during this decade as the once and glorious trade show king E3 has gradually died off. But this year's carried an odd air about it, even before a Splitgate 2 developer walked onstage with a 'Make FPS Great Again Hat' (really) before smacktalking 'the same Call of Duty' and revealing his shooter's battle royale mode.
A lot of that weirdness is because the games industry is going through it right now. It's been over a week since EA killed its Black Panther game and developer Cliffhanger, and industry layoffs have only continued since. Time stops for no one, and since 2023, there've been reductions by the dozens or hundreds, sometimes on a daily, even hourly basis. What we thought was just 'survive til '25' in 2023 or 2024 is now just 'survive' as games and their studios die in the blink of an eye. Combined with what feels like a weirdly muted Nintendo Switch 2 launch and the United States government going through another round of bullshit, of course this trade show feels funky.
Other factors to this strange feeling are owed entirely to Summer Game Fest. Never is it more clear when the industry is chasing trends than an event like this, which had plenty of souls and roguelikes and shooters of the space, competitive, and extraction variety. The two genres' popularity seemed to wear on viewers and remind us how we easily tire of things we once liked. Compared to PlayStation's showcase earlier in the week, SGF also felt less consistent in what it had to offer: Resident Evil Requiem and Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver were agreeable highs, other trailers seemed to show up to be polite or didn't really land.
More problematically, five years in, Summer Game Fest still feels like it has no real identity of its own beyond an extension of the annual year's end Game Awards. Those ceremonies and accompanying game reveals have a substantially different energy thanks to musical performances, celebrity appearances and usually delightful Muppet gags. Without those, SGF feels less 'fun,' for lack of a better word. It wants to be E3, but the big pressers we tuned in for could sometimes be bad as figureheads for game publishers were high off their own supply or overindulged in nonsense they seemed to think was funny. This can't be that, both because publishers have their indvidual, more regular showcases, and it doesn't want to be perceived as disrespectful to the medium and its audience happy to receive recognition but not the criticism that comes with it.
Previously, Keighley has caught flack for failing to properly acknowledge the industry's struggles, or doing so in a clumsy manner. This year's Summer Game Fest opened with him highlighting 2025's current crop of best-selling games, some of which came from teams much smaller than your average triple-A studio. Expedition 33's been the biggest and worst offender of this 'honor'; since the RPG's reveal and launch, it's been lauded as a triumph for a developer with a headcount in the small dozens. But its seven-minute credits show that's not the true story: yes, Sandfall has 33 or 34 employees, but it also had third-party animators, QA contractors, and localizers (and more!) that helped make for a fantastic debut title.
Keighley's stressing of those small teams—one guy made a brawler with just the help of nine of his friends!—turns what was likely a well-intentioned acknowledgment of into additional fuel for the fiery divide between indie and triple-A developers at a bad time for both. The narrative around game development (and who makes them) is bad enough thanks to ongoing layoffs and increased player harassment, and this will likely exacerbate things. It's a moment that best represents the double-edged sword of Summer Game Fest's prominence and this particular industry figurehead: sooner or later, amid all the flash and celebration this window into the industry provides, someone sours things by putting their foot in their mouth.