Summer Game Fest 2021 Announced

I promise, I really do like June. I love it for E3 and all the showcases, but I’m already tired and we’re still a few weeks away. Though E3 will be taking place as a free and fully digital experience this year unlike 2020’s spread of showcases, the event will be taking place specifically between the 12th and 15th of June. I like that, I like that idea a lot because it means I’m cramming a full week’s worth of work into four days. Why does Geoff Keighley have to ruin everything?

☀️The first lineup details are here! ☀️

Welcome to #SummerGameFest 2021

It begins Thursday, June 10 with KICKOFF LIVE! a spectacular live world premiere showcase, including a performance by @weezer, streaming everywhere at 11 am PT / 2 pm ET / 6 pm BST.@summergamefest pic.twitter.com/s6inizAuhU

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 19, 2021

Announced yesterday (to make my life a living hell), on Thursday June the 10th, there will be the kick-off to Summer Game Fest hosted by the Ken Doll of video games, Geoff Keighley. The showcase will be taking place at 11 AM Pacific Time in the US. That’s 2 PM Eastern, and 7 PM if you are in the UK. Yes, Keighley is wrong with “6 PM.” The kick-off show, “Kickoff Life” will also feature a live performance by Weezer, who I last thought of because of the producer of their latest album, Suzy Shinn. Though you probably last thought of them when you had to think about 90210, the zip code not the crap show.

The showcase on the 10th is promised to feature several reveals, with Double Fine announced as one of the appearances there. One would assume this is the usual Keighley-hosted showcase, going on for three hours with you wanting to bang your head off a wall. However, Summer Game Fest is a little more than just one showcase, going ahead all throughout this summer. Several partners have been announced to make appearances, including Xbox, Wizards of the Coast, Ubisoft, Warner Bros, Steam, PlayStation, Devolver Digital, EA, Epic Games, and more.

Some seemingly cross over with E3, though there are notable exceptions, such as EA and PlayStation who’ve both split from the show of three Es. Nintendo is also an E3 exclusive. In the schedule listed on the Summer Game Fest website, the first post-Kickoff Live show is a Ubisoft Forward on the 12th of June at 12 PM Pacific Time, 3 PM Eastern, 8 PM BST. Following that, for six days Steam will be hosting Steam Next Fest starting on June the 16th, set to feature “hundreds of demos.” The last bit of the schedule features EA Play Live on July the 22nd, though times are currently to be announced.

This year’s Summer Game Fest is also “presented by” Prime Gaming, which may mean we see a return to what happened a few years ago with Twitch Prime and E3. That being 22-days of a new games being added to Prime for a short period of time every day, and as the person who writes those Prime Gaming articles, that sounds like a nightmare! As usual, we’ll try to cover as much as we possibly can of both E3 and Summer Game Fest, though we’re still trying to lock down all we can for our schedules.