Summer Game Fest, a four-month digital gaming festival featuring some of gaming’s biggest publishers, kicks off later this month.
Put together by The Game Awards founder and showrunner Geoff Keighley, Summer Game Fest will feature everything from playable demos to digital events hosted by publishers. Microsoft’s Inside Xbox stream, which will feature Xbox Series X games, takes place at 11 a.m. ET on May 7 will kick it off. It culminates with a developer showcase on August 24 that is in collaboration with Gamescom and iam8bit. Keighley says that a full schedule of events will release soon.
Other previously announced events include digital game festivals from Xbox and Steam that will allow players to go hands-on with unreleased titles, which will be similar to the 48-hour Game Festival that The Game Awards put on in December 2019.
Participants for “phase one” of the Summer Game Fest include 2K Games, Activision, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Blizzard Entertainment, Bungie, CD Projekt Red, Digital Extremes, Electronic Arts, PlayStation, Private Division, Riot Games, Square Enix, Steam, Warner Bros., and Xbox.
Keighley said he hopes Nintendo will join Summer Game Fest since it’s the only console maker not yet involved, though the event is open to all publishers.
Introducing @summergamefest, a new season of news, in-game events, and playable content from the entire video game industry. May – August 2020, and a developer showcase with @iam8bit too. See you soon! https://t.co/Hp7WuLrjXk pic.twitter.com/DashSP4Q5I
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 1, 2020
“This year has been a challenge for all of us,” Keighley wrote on Twitter. “For a while, I thought 2020 might be the first time in 25 years we didn’t have a big, magic, industry-wide moment. It really bummed me out to see everything fracture. More than ever, this is a year we need a positive, uplifting center of gravity to bring this global community together.”
Keighley believes that Summer Game Fest will give a glimpse into the future of how games are shown off and that includes giving gamers playable content immediately after seeing a trailer.
“I think these barriers are going to come down not this summer, but in the future, and I think we’ll get to the point where it’ll be playable trailers,” Keighley told GamesIndustry.biz. “Where you can just have a really amazing four-minute experience in a game and then want to check it out. Playable content will be here across this summer, but I also don’t want people to think, ‘I’m getting a Cyberpunk demo. Now I’m getting a Halo Infinite demo.’ Not every game is going to deliver that promise.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.