Geoff Keighley predicts a more traditional not-E3 this year, with fewer showcases from third parties

One-man games industry Geoff Keighley has revealed that third-party publishers won’t be staging as many showcases of their own this summer. Keighley made the comments in a TwitterSpaces cast over the weekend, probably to everyone’s great relief. Of course, he immediately followed up by explaining that the publishers with fewer games to show will be rolling their presentations into Keighley’s own Summer Game Fest, as well as first-party shows such as the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase.

“There were a lot of shows last year where everyone was disappointed when they weren’t really press conferences, right?” Keighley said. “Like Take-Two, Capcom, Square Enix and things like that.”

In case you’ve blocked last June from your memory, I remember Square Enix’s showcase being all right as third-party streams go. It gave us our first look at the highly enjoyable Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, some more news on Life Is Strange: True Colors, and revealed that, err, Babylon’s Fall was actually a live service game all along and not the Nier: Automata successor we’d all been hoping for. Hooray!

Take-Two, on the other hand, announced ahead of time they wouldn’t even be showing any games at their strange panel event, while Capcom’s line-up felt like a “partial” list of what they’d normally would show if they were part of a larger press conference. Key among Capcom’s four already-announced games was Resident Evil Village, which was released a month before the presentation. Additional DLC was also revealed, but nothing was shown, and still hasn’t emerged nearly a year later. Maybe we’ll see a proper announcement at Summer Game Fest Live this year, perhaps?

In all, fewer showcases to keep track of is probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things, but that’s still no guarantee that the ones remaining will have anything properly exciting to show. According to Keighley, more than 15 guests and publishers will make an appearance at this year’s Summer Game Fest Live, but we’ll likely have to wait until the night of June 9th itself before we find out who they are.

Summer Game Fest returns from June 9th-12th this year, and you’ll be able to watch it in IMAX cinemas as well as your regular monitors. Check out our full, updated schedule of every show coming up during this summer’s Not-E3 for more.