Right now, Geoff Keighley is one of the most powerful people in the gaming industry from a certain standpoint. He is the host of The Game Awards, he’s friendly with many big-name developers and publishers, including his “BFF” Hideo Kojima, and now, he’s going to be running unopposed with his Summer Game Fest now that E3 is done. Fairly or not, many people have felt that Geoff himself had a hand to play in the downfall of E3 2023, and there are some reasons why that could be true from a certain point of view.
But if you listen to Geoff Keighley himself on the VGC Podcast, he doesn’t blame himself at all, and emphatically points the blame at someone else…the people who ran E3:
“I think E3 sort of killed itself in a way,” Keighley replied. “I understand why people say [SGF killed E3], but I think if anything, we created Summer Game Fest, and I built Summer Game Fest because I saw the wheels falling off the wagon of E3. As someone who loves that time of year… for two decades, E3 was part of my life since I was a 15-year-old kid. [From] the first E3 in 1995, I went to every show. I loved it and it defined my summer. I think they had a relevancy problem, and then they also had a participation problem over the final years.
Those last two points are true no matter how you look at it. At a certain point, E3 was bigger than it ever was before, and yet, things were changing without it catching up. That caused radical shifts like the “Press Only” event instead of bringing in fans.
Geoff said that he made the Summer Game Fest because he could tell that E3 was basically imploding and not doing what needed to be done. That being said, E3 2023 was supposed to happen and had several big-name publishers…that all of a sudden backed out with no real reason why. That led many to think that Geoff was behind it as he “lured them” to his Summer Game Fest:
“I get the sentiment around it. It was sad to me that we had to decide to go off and build something new, but we did that all in partnership with the publishers, and our list of partners for Summer Game Fest did not change at all with the cancellation of E3 this year,” he said.
You can be the judge of whether you believe him or not. But the bottom line is that E3 is out, and Keighley’s event is happening.
