Summer Game Fest 2023 kicks off just a few days before E3

The Game Awards 2019 - Show
Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards in 2019. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images

Summer Game Fest is back again in 2023 with its first-ever in-person kickoff show on June 8th, which just so happens to be a few days before E3’s big return.

For the past three years, Summer Game Fest has served as the gaming industry’s big June blowout while E3 has been in flux due to the pandemic. E3 hasn’t happened as a big in-person event for quite a while; it was canceled in 2020, held as a series of remote events in 2021, and canceled again in 2022. In its place, Summer Game Fest became one of the biggest virtual events of the June gaming season. (In 2021, it was where we saw the first gameplay trailer of Elden Ring.)

This year, both Summer Game Fest and E3 are back with major in-person components in the Los Angeles area, setting up for a potentially huge June gaming news season. Summer Game Fest starts things off with the June 8th show that will once again be hosted by Geoff Keighley. The event will take place at the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater in Inglewood, California, and tickets go on sale in early 2023. If you aren’t able to attend the live event, you’ll be able to catch it on major streaming platforms.

E3 follows a bit after, from June 13th through June 16th, with dedicated days for both games industry attendees and general consumers. There was an industry-only “Play Days” component to Summer Game Fest this year, and it’s unclear if that will be back in 2023; when we asked if it was returning, spokesperson Jackie Moore said that Summer Games Fest is currently just “announcing the Kickoff show, and we’ll have more details to come in 2023.”

“Over the past three years, Summer Game Fest has cultivated an incredible community around the world through our digital-first events, and we’re thrilled to invite thousands of fans to experience the SGF show in-person for the first time in 2023,” Geoff Keighley, curator and host of Summer Game Fest, said in a press release. “In keeping with tradition, we’ll have tons of exciting announcements from the developers that are pushing the games industry forward, and will once again highlight other publisher digital events, demos, and more surprises to be announced in the coming months.”

Source: The Verge Summer Game Fest 2023 kicks off just a few days before E3

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