Yesterday, the annual Summer Game Fest showcase was held in Los Angeles to a live audience for the first time. Several thousand attendees, myself included, flooded the YouTube Theater in hopes of having our gamer minds blown by a torrent of new game reveals and exciting gameplay reveals. While there were plenty of trailers, updates, and first-looks, with more than 30 games featured during the two hour broadcast, in the end only seven of them were true reveals for unannounced games.
Of those seven games, three of them - Sonic Superstars, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall - are 2D side scrollers. They’re very different kinds of sidescrollers, but it's an interesting commonality for nearly half the new games on the list. The other four reveals were John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior (some more Prince of Persia similarities), Sand Land, and Star Trek Infinite. There’s some notable IPs on that list, but not exactly the kind of big-budget triple-A reveals people typically hope to see in these kinds of showcases.
That’s not to say it was a bad showcase. A lot of highly-anticipated games were featured with first looks at gameplay, like Mortal Kombat 1, Alan Wake 2, Space Marines 2, and Path of Exile 2. We finally got release dates for Spider-Man 2, Remnant 2, and Witchfire. And though the energy in the room started to dip near the end, the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth trailer ended things on a high note. As everyone filed out of the theater, the excitement around Cosmo Canyon and the Chocobo barns was palpable.
But it’s also hard to believe that the big finale of the summer showcase was a trailer for a game we’ve known about for years. The entire tradition is based around giving the audience something they never would have expected, but that seems to have been lost in the post-E3 era. Watching Geoff Keighley breathlessly tee-up a trailer we’re all expecting felt somewhat disingenuous. Compare that moment to the reveal of Final Fantasy 7 Remake at E3 2015, and it's easy to see how much the hype game has changed.
Summer Game Fest isn’t a single centralized moment for gaming the way E3 was, of course. We had a PlayStation Showcase last week, an Xbox Showcase coming up this Sunday, Ubisoft Connect and Capcom Showcase on Monday, and it won’t be long before there’s another Nintendo Direct, too. Publishers don’t save up big reveals and unleash them all in one exciting week the way they used to. No one is trying to ‘win’ Summer Game Fest. We used to know when the next big game was going to be revealed, but that doesn’t seem to be the role Summer Game Fest is going to fill.
I don’t think it's presumptuous or entitled to expect to be wowed by these showcases. Publishers have successfully turned running commercials for video games into a legitimate must-see event - so long as what’s being shown actually is must-see. E3 always felt like an extension of gaming culture and community as much as it was a marketing ploy, but spending two hours in a theater with restless gamers just to learn about Sonic Superstars and get a glimpse of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth didn’t really make me feel like I was part of a moment - at least not a moment I’ll remember.