Summer Game Fest 2024 Showcases AAA's Endless Winter | Push Square

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Geoff Keighley clearly cares deeply about games, and we won’t hear otherwise. This is a man who started out as a journalist with a surging passion for the medium, and has fast-tracked his career in such a way that he’s almost become the unelected voice of enthusiast gamers. While that’s a title he’d likely shy away from, there’s no denying he’s made himself a face of the industry, and that’s through sheer determination and hard-earned connections.

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The problem with Summer Game Fest, like all of Keighley’s shows, is that they live and die based on the content shown – and this was a particularly weak one. While we’re fully expecting Microsoft to pick up the slack later this weekend, with its trio of publishers all squashed into a single showcase, it’s becoming increasingly clear that AAA gaming is stuck in an endless winter. With development cycles longer than they’ve ever been, and the impact of the pandemic still very much looming, it feels like the medium is light on the heaviest of hitters right now.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to play, there obviously is: LEGO Horizon Adventures exceeded all our expectations, and looks like a genuinely entertaining alternative take on Aloy’s escapades; Metaphor: ReFantazio looks locked in as another must-play RPG from Atlus, the team behind the Persona titles; Slitterhead has all the jank and unbridled creativity of a Japan Studio cult classic, and; Black Myth: Wukong is actually coming out, after years of anticipation.

But, if we look at the reaction to the show, it’s clear most fans felt it didn’t sizzle – if anything, it barely even fizzled. And that’s because, respectfully, as with Sony’s State of Play recently, gamers don’t stay up until past midnight in Europe to find out Amazon’s MMO New World is getting ported to PS5; they don’t get up early in Asia to learn a console port of Valorant is getting a closed console beta. They want to see Naughty Dog; they want to see Sucker Punch. Heck,