Summer Game Fest 2023 Wrap-Up: Winners, Losers & Creamy Middles

The dust is now settling on what should have been E3 week but has become Geoff Keighley’s personal playground.

Summer Game Fest has quickly established itself as the new game in town, and the once-great E3 is all but dead in the water. It’s hard to blame them, though. The appeal of E3 – a massive convention where all your favorite companies made all their biggest announcements – is something of a dinosaur that sorely needed a fresh coat of paint. Once companies realized they could publish videos for cheaper and a much broader spread, it was the end of the road.

There’s always a chance that E3 returns next year, but for this year, Geoff Keighley and Summer Game Fest hit the ground running and took home the gold. Celebrity cameos, big reveals and first looks from big names like Bethesda, Netherrealm Studios, Square Enix and more punctuated a hell of a week for gamers, though not everyone managed to come out on top.

Geoff Keighly Hammers the Final Nail in E3’s Coffin

If you had doubts that Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest was the death knell for E3, you could wash them away now. Keighley’s fourth annual event blew Sony & Microsoft’s conferences out of the water.

Sure, it’s easy to chalk it up to the surprising wins of the Mortal Kombat 1 gameplay reveal or having Nicolas Cage show up to talk about Dead by Daylight. But look at what’s happening beyond that. Keighley got two massive Spider-Man 2 reveals and – perhaps even more damning – locked down the exclusive new trailer for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a franchise so identified with Sony that no one’s surprised it’s never coming out on Xbox.

Keighley’s Summer Game Fest didn’t just outdo the competition. It stepped on their faces to get up to the podium. The question now, though, is can he keep it up? Last year’s SGF was a notoriously dull affair, but much of that was attributed to the industry still playing catch-up after the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll see if Gamescom and The Game Awards take that same approach.

The Power of PlayStation 5 Can’t Save a Dismal Presentation

Sony tried to get in front of the pack with their PlayStation Showcase a week before SGF. Unfortunately, it just didn’t stick the landing. There’s a lot of great stuff here, don’t get me wrong. The Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake is a significant announcement, but no gameplay or date is attached.

But the biggest dropped ball might be Spider-Man 2. Sony was clearly hinging a lot of their showcase on the debut of gameplay from the game, but the two biggest reveals – a first look at Venom and the confirmed release date – wound up going to Summer Game Fest. The result is a Sony conference that is pretty neat but didn’t have that much to get players excited. Can Sony still stick the landing with a back half bolstered by Spider-Man 2 and an early 2024 release date or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth?

Game Pass and Starfield Show Promise – But Where’s the Gameplay?

I’ve been all in on Xbox for a while now, and I love my little Game Pass machine, but the Xbox conference itself was pretty underwhelming. There are a LOT of great ideas here – South of Midnight, Fable and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth have my interest, but there’s no gameplay to be found in these trailers – just in-engine concept trailers. Fortunately, Xbox did have RPG fans wrapped around their fingers – specifically Atlus fans. Persona 3 Remake, Persona 4 Tactica and Metaphor: ReFantazio are poised to scratch many RPG-centric itches.

Like Sony was banking on Spider-Man 2 being a huge hit, Xbox put its eggs in Starfield’s basket. Bethesda essentially landed it with an impressive look at a game that might honestly be too big at this point. It’s hard to get excited, though. Starfield’s already suffered repeated delays, and after the fiasco that was Fallout 76’s launch, even Bethesda fans have reason to be cautiously optimistic about such a massive, open-world space RPG.

Capcom & Ubisoft – What The Hell Was That?

Do you like cars? Ubisoft has cars—lots of cars.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the look of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and I am 100% in for Star Wars: Outlaws. But Ubisoft’s remaining announcements, as per usual, kind of slowed the whole thing to a crawl. Assassin’s Creed: Mirage looks great if you’re into Assassin’s Creed, but for the rest of us, it’s just more of the same.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, was Capcom. The Capcom Showcase only had one huge announcement – that Pragmata was now completely undated and delayed indefinitely. The remainder of Capcom’s show was teasers for rereleases, remakes and recapping trailers that had already been shown elsewhere. It’s a shame; I was really hoping for Street Fighter 6 DLC, but there just wasn’t anything to be found.