Does literally every publisher need a stream? The answer is no
With E3 dead and buried for this year, it’s all about Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest 2022, and whatever scattered streams decide to casually show up around it. Thankfully, there might be less of the latter in 2022.
Speaking on Twitter Spaces (as reported by VGC), Keighley does what he does best: hype up his Summer Game Fest event. But this time he provides cold hard facts that actually highlight what this year’s festival could look like, and things seem good in terms of making it actually feel E3-esque in 2022. Point blank, he explains:
“There were a lot of shows last year where everyone was disappointed when they weren’t really press conferences, right? Like Take-Two, Capcom, Square Enix and things like that…I think [they] have learned that if you’re going to do a press conference, you kind of need to have 30 minutes-plus of stuff, and sometimes they only have one or two great games to show, which may not be enough to do a full event around. So I think that’s going to be a bit of a shift. I have a pretty good sense of what’s coming in the next month, and I think people will be hyped about games in general.”
It’s kind of a bold statement in a way — noting that Summer Game Fest is bigger than, say, a Square Enix conference — but he’s absolutely right about people being disappointed in general by smaller showcases; a reaction even companies like EA aren’t immune to.
Now, we could still get a billion streams anyway, despite this claim. But this has me hopeful that at the very least, several publishers will “fold” into a bigger event, if only because they realized they can’t cut it on their own in the past.
