Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. Guides

Everything we know about Summer Game Fest 2022

By

With E3 being canceled this year, and many unsure if it will ever return, the summer was in danger of being a wild west of every publisher and developer creating their own events and announcements with no rhyme or reason. For all the faults with it, E3 at least organized all the major players in the gaming space into some sort of order that everyone — players and press — could keep track of and plan around based on their interests.

In the vacuum left by that iconic summer event full of press conferences, Geoff Keighley has stepped up in the past few years to introduce a new system to maintain order during the summer announcements.

Summer Game Fest is quite different from Keighley’s longer-running, more established Game Awards held in December. Each year has looked slightly different, but as the summer looms closer, more and more details about how this year’s Summer Game Fest will unfold are being announced. This is shaping up to be the event of the year for gamers, so we rounded up everything you need to know about Summer Game Fest so you can catch all the exciting news, announcements, and more.

Related

See more

What is Summer Game Fest?

Geoff Keighley holds and points at a DualSense controller.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Summer Game Fest is the creation of game industry legend Geoff Keighley that, in his words, is “the world’s first fully digital, global celebration of video games.” He has been personally running this event every year since 2020 in an attempt to give publishers and developers a way to showcase their projects to the world in an organized and professional way. Summer Game Fest kicks off with a live showcase hosted by Keighley that features announcements and game reveals. Last year’s kickoff event included the very first gameplay shown for Elden Ring, a reveal of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and even Jeff Goldblum appearing to announce Jurassic World Evolution 2. That event will then be followed over the course of the summer by a series of streams prepared by developers and publishers to show off new games, give updates on ones scheduled to launch or make any other major announcements.

The first Summer Game Fest was more of an organizational tool to use to track when each publisher was hosting their own showcases, and technically ran from May all the way until August, but 2021 managed to condense these between the months of June and July and featured nearly all the biggest names in the industry, including Microsoft, Nintendo, and Ubisoft.

When is Summer Game Fest?

Get ready!!@IMAX is teaming us with us for #SummerGameFest on June 9 and @TheGameAwards in December!

That’s right: Watch all the reveals, surprises and announcements with your friends in select IMAX theaters for full-scale immersion :)

This is going to be cool! IMAX LIVE! pic.twitter.com/dvQPIgqF09

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 5, 2022

Announced via Twitter, Summer Game Fest 2022 will kick off with a live show on June 9. Summer Game Fest Live as this showcase is called, will be streamed that Thursday beginning at 11 a.m. PT and will include a “cross-industry showcase with announcements, reveals, and more.” Aside from watching it in your own home, Summer Game Fest has also partnered with IMAX to screen this opening event in select theaters. We don’t know for how long this initial livestream will be as of yet. According to the official website, while not all dates are set, so far the only scheduled events are in June.

After this live event, the next digital showcase planned as part of Summer Game Fest will be the Tribeca Games Spotlight on June 10 at noon PT, followed by the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase on June 12 at 10 a.m. PT.

More partners and digital events are expected to be announced as the event approaches, so we’ll keep you updated here with any new additions.

How to watch

You can watch Summer Game Fest 2022 on all major streaming services, including Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter. Or, if available near you, you can watch Summer Game Fest Live at an IMAX theater.

What can we expect to see?

A man taking a picture of the EA logo.
Christian Peterson / Getty / EA

So far, there have been no real clues as to what exactly we can expect to see at this year’s Summer Game Fest. However, a list of all the partners currently confirmed to be a part of the event in some form is listed. Going alphabetically, the list includes:

  • 2K
  • Activision
  • Amazon Games
  • Annapurna
  • Blizzard
  • Capcom
  • Devolver
  • Dotemu
  • EA
  • Epic Games
  • Finji
  • Frontier
  • Gearbox
  • Hi-Rez
  • Innersloth
  • Koch Media
  • Mediatonic
  • MiHoYo
  • Bandai Namco
  • Netflix
  • Psyonix
  • Raw Fury
  • Riot Games
  • Saber
  • Sega
  • Sony
  • Prime Gaming
  • Square Enix
  • Steam
  • Tencent Games
  • Tribeca Festival
  • Ubisoft
  • Warner Bros.
  • Wizards of the Coast
  • Xbox

Big names we expect to have some major announcements to make from that list include Sony, Xbox, Capcom, Sega, Square Enix, and hopefully a few surprises as well. Since Xbox and Bethesda are the only major ones to have a scheduled conference of their own so far, right now we can only really count on them having a good amount of stuff to show.

Editors’ Recommendations

Jesse Lennox
Jesse Lennox
Jesse Lennox loves writing, games, and complaining about not having time to write and play games. He knows the names of more…
Summer Game Fest returns just before E3 2023 next June
The official artwork confirming Summer Game Fest's return on June 8, 2023.

Geoff Keighley has confirmed when Summer Game Fest will return in June 2023. It will begin with a live kickoff show on June 8, 2023, placing Keighley's game announcement alternative less than a week before E3's grand (intended) 2023 return.
Unlike past years, Summer Game Fest Live Kickoff 2023 will feature a live audience, like Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards. It will take place in the YouTube Theater at Hollywood Park, with tickets going on sale in early 2023. It will still be livestreamed across platforms like YouTube and Twitch, though. It's currently unknown who's participating, how long Summer Game Fest will run afterward, or if it will feature a Summer Game Fest Play Days-like element for fans. Still, Keighley says all of that info will be revealed ahead of the event next year, teasing what people can expect. 
"In keeping with tradition, we'll have tons of exciting announcements from the developers that are pushing the games industry forward, and will once again highlight other publisher digital events, demos, and more surprises to be announced in the coming months," Keighley says in a press release. 
That June 8 start date, and the other Summer Game Fest events likely to follow, put Keighley's show just ahead of E3 2023. The ESA and ReedPop plan to bring E3 back between June 13 and June 16, 2023. With five days of lead time on E3, Summer Game Fest can coexist with the long-running gaming conference and encompass the plethora of publisher showcases that tend to precede E3.
Geoff Keighley made it clear that he wants Summer Game Fest and E3 to coexist for a while. "We've had extensive conversations with ReedPop about E3," he said in an interview with Epic Games Store. "I think it'll kind of fit together and flow kind of from what we're doing into what they're doing and stuff. E3, to me, is this kind of master brand that represents gaming news in June."
With the start date of Summer Game Fest confirmed, the coexistence of these two summer gaming events is a reality. Summer Game Fest returns on June 8, 2023.

Read more
Horizon story explained: Everything you should know about Aloy’s journey so far
horizon zero dawn the frozen wild review campfire

After making almost nothing besides FPS titles in the Killzone series, it was seen as a major risk for Guerrilla Games to suddenly shift gears and announce they were making an open-world, third-person action RPG. Set in a post-apocalypse where humans are besieged by wild robots that very closely resemble dinosaurs and other wildlife, Horizon Zero Dawn turned out to be a massive hit in a year full of other excellent games to compete with. Being a new IP, it had a lot of work to do between establishing a new world, characters, gameplay mechanics, and more.

Horizon Zero Dawn's story is broken into two major components: There are the events that lead up to the world becoming the way it is in the game and the actual plot revolving around protagonist Aloy and her quest. Keeping everything straight is complicated on its own, but if you missed some key audio logs, got distracted by all the extra activities to do in the open world, or just forgot the important beats over the years, it might be confusing by the time you get to Horizon Forbidden West. And if you're confused starting that game, you will be totally lost by the end of it, so let's set the record straight by explaining the entire story of Horizon so far.

Read more
Everything we know about The Callisto Protocol
Alien behind main character of The Callisto Protocol

The Dead Space franchise was ... dead ... for quite some time, so rather than waiting for Electronic Arts to bring it back, a new studio decided to take the reins with a spiritual successor. The Callisto Protocol is an upcoming third-person survival-horror game from newly formed developer Striking Distance Studios. While a Dead Space remake is in the works at EA Motive, we're still excited about The Callisto Protocol since it seems to be a healthy mixture of new and familiar, with veteran talent behind it.

But what do we know about this upcoming horror experience? Here, we'll dive into everything, including a release date, the trailer, platforms, and the story for The Callisto Protocol.

Read more