Continuing the summer onslaught of gaming events and showcases is Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022, hosted by The Game Awards’ Geoff Keighley. This year’s showcase marks the return of a live audience, and is set to feature plenty of game announcements over the course of two hours. So when is it going down and what can you expect from the show?
Here’s everything you need to know about Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022.
Gamescom Opening Night Live kicks off at 2 pm E.T. on August 23, 202. This event, hosted by Keighley, marks the official start of the Gamescom expo, which will be open to the public this year.
Gamescom takes place annually in Cologne, Germany. Tickets for the convention itself, along with Opening Night Live, are available now.
On Tuesday, August 23, @gamescom Opening Night Live streams LIVE from Germany.
🔵 2 hour live show
🔵 Thousands of fans in the audience!
🔵 30+ games on stage
If you are in Germany, limited in-person tickets are now available for fans.
Buy them here: https://t.co/crQarVvABg pic.twitter.com/x8YV3I8j9d
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) August 9, 2022
Unless you attend in person, you’ll have to catch the livestream via The Game Awards’ YouTube or Twitch channels. As always, if you miss the livestream the first time or if you want to watch it again, you’ll be able to watch the show as a standard video afterward.
Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022 will be a two-hour show featuring over 30 games. We know the event will give us another look at the upcoming Sonic Frontiers, along with the reveal of a new sci-fi strategy game from Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds. Goat Simulator 3 will also make an appearance, as will Hogwarts Legacy.
Last year’s Opening Night Live show featured the announcements of Saints Row, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, so there’s precedent for the event featuring big reveals.
While Keighly hasn’t publicly excluded anything just yet, there are some games that are unlikely to make an appearance at the show. For example, since Nintendo just showed Splatoon 3 during a recent showcase, new information about it probably won’t be featured again so soon, especially since it’ll release in just a couple of weeks.
Likewise, despite Grand Theft Auto 6 being in the news recently, it’s highly unlikely to show up during Keighley’s annual European event.
Still, we’ll have over 30 games to look forward to during Gamescom Opening Night Live’s two-hour runtime.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.