This year’s Summer Game Fest was the biggest ever, at least for a digital-only showcase. That’s according to Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley, who noted this year’s presentation was "our biggest Summer Game Fest showcase yet for viewership and social engagement around the world."
Summer Game Fest topped out at 3.5 million peak concurrent global viewers on June 9 and totaled 27 million streams. That’s up 8 percent from last year, according to the presenter’s infographic. Twitter stats were also up for Summer Game Fest, with double the number of Twitter conversations year over year, and 69 percent more usage of the #SummerGameFest hashtag. And there were 6,000 co-streams if you needed a content creator’s spin on the festivities.
While it’s good to see Summer Game Fest grow, these numbers are still nowhere near the viewership of Keighley’s other big annual event, The Game Awards, which brought in 85 million viewers last year. E3 is also expected to return next year, so Summer Game Fest is going to have some competition again.
This year's Summer Game Fest was great, but there was a strange preponderance of space-based horror games. There was Aliens: Dark Descent, the new isometric co-op game that seems to turn Aliens into Diablo. There's also The Callisto Protocol, the sci-fi horror shooter set in the PUBG universe, only now it seems to have way more in common with Dead Space than PUBG. And scariest of all was Routine, an atmospheric survival game where you have to fend off a space station full of rampaging robots.
Summer Game Fest should really lean into its own themes next time. This year should have been survival space horror, and maybe next year will be cozy farming games where you grab colorful blobs and shoot them out of a vacuum gun. Now there’s an aesthetic.
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