At least one of the games shown here tends to become a breakout hit Untitled Goose Game featured a few years ago, as did Bafta-winning prog rock curiosity The Artful Escape.ĭevolver digital Showcase – 8 June A comedic bright spot in among a week of Very Serious Trailers, the Devolver showcase is usually worth tuning into to see what elaborate corporate satire they will fabricate. Promisingly, Keighley has invited developers to actually speak about their games, so this will be more engaging than just a stream of CG videos.ĭay of the Devs digital Showcase – 8 June Of all the many indie-focused livestreams of the next few weeks, this is the one to watch, run by endearingly hipster game art and collectibles outfit iam8bit and Double Fine (of Psychonauts 2 and much else). Horror sequel Alan Wake 2 will premiere gameplay here, as will the new Mortal Kombat (be ready to watch that through your hands if you’re squeamish). It’s a live show, run out of LA’s YouTube theater, and will pull in a range of announcements from publishers big and small, including Xbox and PlayStation, and relatively new gaming-space entrant Netflix. Summer Game Fest – 8 June This has become the de facto E3 stand-in, run by longtime games industry pundit Geoff Keighley, who of course also runs December’s Game awards.
Arcade odyssey summer series#
Other things that stood out to me: Marathon, an artsy reimagining of Halo studio Bungie’s very first weird sci-fi game another remake of 2004’s Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, in which series creator Hideo Kojima is not involved and Revenant Hill, a game in which you play as an aspiring feline witch’s familiar, and whose connections to millennial coming-of-age classic Night in the Woods are evident from its art style. PlayStation Showcase This happened a couple of weeks ago, and it included a sequence of variably interesting trailers followed by an extended look at Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5 (pictured top), which does look like a superbly entertaining (if also resolutely on-rails) Marvel action game.
Starfield, part of the Xbox Showcase this month. If you want to follow along yourself, here’s my pick of what’s worth watching. It’s more work to find that excitement now among 15-plus different livestreams, but hey, that’s what I’m here for! Over the next couple of weeks, the Guardian’s games writers and I will be sifting through the endless livestreams and report on the most interesting morsels. But I do miss the nexus of novelty and excitement that E3 used to represent – a week when the entire global media was paying attention to games, and when every player knew there would be something to interest them. There’s no shortage of interesting stories to tell about video games.
Instead, we have been writing dispatches from within the worlds they create, talking to players as much as developers. For many years now, talking to the people who make and sell video games has been a smaller part of the job, as publishers have taken control of their own comms via social media and livestreams, and enlisted influencers to advertise for them. And though gaming fandom has ample people willing to tune into this stuff, the world at large just isn’t watching. People can speculate on what’s shown to drum-up clicks or views on YouTube, but all that amounts to is more hype. It’s harder for us to do a good job when this is what you’re working with.
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This may work brilliantly for the world’s game publishers, because they get full control of the message with no inconvenient live slip-ups or follow-up questions, but it feels so inauthentic – and players are as wise to that as journalists.
There’s no room for questions, analysis or digging for more information – in other words, for journalism.
Now, we are given a carefully curated and scripted advertising package.
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