The Summer Game Fest 2021 unofficially served as the kickoff for E3 2021 week. Host Geoff Keighley showcased so many trailers in a “one-man show” that MeinMMO author Schuhmann’s head was spinning. This is how many people might wish for E3, he says, but it is just terrible.
This was the Summer Game Fest:
- Officially, Geoff Keighley’s “Summer Game Fest” has nothing to do with E3. It is an event where numerous companies simply showcase their new video games, happening just before E3.
- Unofficially, the “Summer Game Fest” 2021 is the closest thing to a general “E3 main event.” Many developers who didn’t hold their own major show, like Microsoft, Bethesda, or Ubisoft, represented their games at this event.
The “Summer Game Fest” is presented by Geoff Keighley. The Canadian was previously a journalist and was regarded in 2012, during the “Dorito Affair,” as a symbol of “industry closeness and the commercialization of video games.”
By now, Keighley is a sort of super-networker, hosting huge shows where publishers can promote their games. In previous years, Keighley had his own E3 show with the “E3 Coliseum,” but starting in 2020, he launched the “Summer Game Fest” as a kind of replacement for E3, which was either canceled (2020) or switched to digital (2021) due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “Summer Game Fest” had Amazon as a main sponsor in the background, who wanted to promote their “Prime Gaming” offer and did so extensively.
140 seconds for Lost Ark, 38 seconds for Paladins
This is how the event went: There were mainly an incredible number of trailers. A user created a time list of the event on YouTube, showing how many seconds each individual game was featured:
- Lost Ark, an MMORPG, which many players in Europe have been looking forward to since 2014, got exactly 140 seconds of airtime.
- A segment on New World, where Keighley referred to another event, was rattled off in 64 seconds.
- New characters in Genshin Impact received 61 seconds of space.
- The poor shooter Paladins: Champions of the Realm – gen:Lock was shown for 38 seconds before Keighley smoothly integrated the next advertisement for Amazon into the show.
Overall, the show had a strong advertising character. They featured 3 Hollywood stars who promoted “their” games with varying degrees of enthusiasm:
- Jeff Goldblum: “Hey, I was in Jurassic Park 30 years ago – Remember?” introduced Jurassic World: Evolution 2.
- Giancarlo Esposito: “Hey, I played Gus in Breaking Bad” makes the villain from Far Cry 6 and had a longer segment.
- Ryan Reynolds: “Hey, I’m Deadpool and understand every insider joke” got to promote his own film, where Twitch star Pokimane raved about the “nice guy.” This “Hey, there’s Pokimane!” moment somehow fit into the evening, where everything seemed to rush by.
These segments of the show lasted a bit longer, around 4 minutes each, which can be noted positively. Unfortunately, these celebrity clips felt like games needed to be elevated by the presence of Hollywood stars.
Since Keanu Reeves found everything “breathtaking” one time, I guess it has to be this way now.
Only for the conversation with his “BFF” Hideo Kojima did Keighley seem to take a bit more time.
13 games in 3 minutes – Who can keep up?
This was my problem with the show: The pace was simply too high. The games seemed to blur into each other, nothing could be digested, there was no time for anything.
The highlight was a segment presented by the German publisher Koch Media. Keighley, however, did not pronounce “Koch” because in English it becomes “Cock,” a slang word for penis. Koch Media squeezed a dozen games into a segment that lasted 189 seconds. Anyone who could remember a single detail at the end of this round, I bow to.
For me, all that remains is “Hey, there’s Payday.”
The segment starts at 1:18 hours:
The show also felt like a continuous infomercial for Amazon and their Prime service.
Chat cannot replace audience reaction
What was missing due to COVID-19 was the audience reaction to the individual trailers. The “Ohs” and “Ahs” of the crowd can simply not be replaced by a chat where excited “OMG ELDEN RING” is spammed. Keighley and Amazon cannot do anything about it, but it intensified the feeling: The event is synthetic and has nothing to do with the “live fair feeling” that past streams from E3 provided.
One must surely take off one’s hat to Geoff Keighley for organizing such an event, and some may find it great to split a complete gaming year into 90-second bites and squeeze it into 2 hours. Particularly the “Twitch chat” generation posts yawning emojis at every second of downtime and wants the next piece of information, the next kick.
But for me, the two hours of “Summer Game Fest” felt like “trailer binge-watching”: You come out stuffed, tired, and no longer want more.
For those who want to take in the trailers of individual games at their own pace, we have compiled everything in a live ticker:
The Summer Game Fest 2021 in the live ticker – all announcements and new trailers
