“June is definitely a good time for people to ramp up, get people excited about things coming in the future. So yes, there will be some good announcements. They’ll be good, meaningful updates on games,” Keighley said, adding that, for example, in 2021, the Summer Game Fest showed off gameplay of “Elden Ring,” a previously announced game that still drew a lot of interest. “Will you get everything you want? No. But I think there’ll be some good stuff this year.”
The 2022 gaming news event is mostly digital, though it will feature an in-person component. Imax movie theaters will air the Summer Game Fest in the U.S., Canada and United Kingdom starting on June 9, live from Los Angeles. Viewers can tune into the exact same show on Twitch. (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
While individual game companies will do their own events, as they have in past years, Keighley said he plans to organize things so that they don’t heavily overlap. In another major gaming showcase, Xbox will hold its live-streamed event on June 12.
In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Keighley said he has been in conversations with several Ukrainian studios whose game titles — such as GSC Game World’s “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” — have been impacted.
“There have been a number of teams, honestly, that we were talking [with] about content for our show, that are in Ukraine, and they’ve had to relocate and can’t finish their trailer, can’t finish their game, because they’re in the middle of a situation,” Keighley said. “We’re conscious of those games and actively trying to think about what’s the right way to recognize some of those teams and the hardships that they’ve been through.”
Keighley made headlines in 2020, when he announced he was skipping E3 for the first time in 25 years, saying the event needed to evolve.
This year, Summer Game Fest will take place in the backdrop of another canceled E3, just as it did in 2020.
“You’ll find no bigger fan than me of what E3 represented to the industry. And I went to it for 25 years,” Keighley said. “I still think E3 needs to figure out its place in this new digital, global landscape. Game companies have figured out there are lots of great ways to program directly to fans. With Summer Game Fest, we’re very cognizant of that; we’re not just trying to be an E3 replacement. We’re doing something very different and approaching it as a free, digital-first celebration of games. The great thing is we can build it from the ground into something completely new. And we don’t have the baggage and legacy of trying to sell booths to people or hotel rooms.”
Keighley told The Post last December that the other event he hosts, the Game Awards, would take a “thoughtful, measured” approach toward non-fungible tokens (NFTs). For this year’s Summer Game Fest, Keighley similarly said he had no plans to have anything NFT or blockchain-related.
“Some people are like, ‘Oh Geoff, I see you following an NFT account on Twitter.’ And it’s like, I’m interested to learn about that stuff. But I’ve yet to see anything that really crosses over to content that would be accretive to the experience. Look, if I see a game or experience that I think is really going to be compelling and interesting and leverages those technologies in a meaningful way, we’ll of course look at it,” Keighley said.
As for whether Activision Blizzard, a company facing multiple lawsuits and government investigations, will be present at Summer Game Fest, Keighley said the situation was evolving. Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“In the back of our minds, obviously, is the zeitgeist of what’s going on at both of these companies but also, in the community,” he said. “Everyone’s opinions continue to evolve among all these topics, so it’s hard to put a pin in something and say, ‘Hey, this is exactly how we’re going to treat this throughout the entire year.’ ”
Another hotly discussed industry topic is unionization. When asked whether organizing labor would impact Summer Game Fest, Keighley said, “Trying to make our show is ultimately to support creators of games and let them showcase their work. I hope we empower game creators, through our shows, to reach audiences and feel like they can reach those audiences directly.”
