As the main show of Summer Games Fest has now come and gone the focus shifts from wondering what might show up to deep dives on what did, and wondering why things didn't show up.
Overall I personally thought the show was ok. It lacked the "wow" factor of many big unknown reveals and the crowd that was in the building didn't seem to have that same juice as previous years which certainly helps.
It also didn't help that 2K accidentally leaked what was probably the biggest announcement of the show early with Civilization VII. Regardless for whatever reason the show just didn't seem to hit with the crowd too much and online discourse has been average at best.
I think that's slightly unfair to a lot of the great indies shown, but unfortunately when it comes to these big shows it's the big games that move the needle, and there just wern't that many, and most of the big games that were there were shown previously. Games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Warhammer 40k Space Marines 2 and Star Wars Outlaws looked great but the big games were few and far between. But why is that?
The easiest answer, at least to me, seems to be price. According to sources it cost $250,000 to get your game in the door for 1 minute, and 100k every 30 additional seconds up to a max of 550k. Now with all due respect to Geoff's show and what he does for the industry, those are insane prices. Not only are they super steep for a small indie game, but for big publishers it makes little sense.
Summer Games Fest is a huge platform and the indie games on it for sure benefit from the exposure. They wouldn't get nearly as many eyeballs on their game if they announced anywhere else or on their own. But major publishers? They don't need this. EA can put out a trailer for something on their own tomorrow for free and get the same exposure as being on the show.
On top of that a few companies still do their own shows so the focus is on that and not the main Summer Games Fest Show. All of this adds up to not many big releases. And while I personally don't mind that I can see why many want the wow factor.
Until the prices come down some I think we will continue to see Geoff Keighley tell people to lower their expectations.
