Why Summer Game Fest Has Fully Replaced E3 (And Why We’re Mostly Okay With It)

I remember exactly where I was for the Kojima “It’s Time” reveal. I remember losing my mind over the original Death Stranding trailer at E3 2016, confused and thrilled in equal measure, texting my friends in all caps because I did not have words yet, only feelings. I remember the crowd noise. I remember what it felt like to watch thousands of strangers in a convention hall lose their collective minds at the exact same second I did, and to feel like I was part of something bigger than just watching a trailer on my laptop.

E3 gave me that. For two decades, it gave a lot of us that.

And it’s gone. It has been gone for a while now, quietly and then not so quietly, and in its place we got Summer Game Fest: a livestream out of the Dolby Theatre hosted by Geoff Keighley, sandwiched between a PlayStation State of Play and a Nintendo Direct and an Xbox Games Showcase, with tickets for actual in-person seats reselling for $300 on Ticketmaster for people who apparently need to watch a livestream from the room where it’s happening.

As a fan who grew up on E3, I have complicated feelings about this. But here’s the thing I’ve come around to after years of watching this transition play out: Summer Game Fest didn’t kill E3. E3 killed itself. And honestly? What replaced it is, in most of the ways that matter to me as an actual gamer rather than someone chasing nostalgia, better.

Let me walk you through why.

E3 Didn’t Get Murdered. It Committed Slow, Public Suicide

Here’s the thing people conveniently forget when they get misty-eyed about E3: it did not die because Summer Game Fest showed up with a knife. It died because it spent years refusing to adapt while the entire industry moved on without it.

Geoff Keighley, who had been personally involved with E3 since he was fifteen years old and attended every single show for two decades, has been remarkably honest about this in interviews. “I think E3 sort of killed itself in a way,” he told the VGC Podcast. “I understand why people say [SGF killed E3], but I think, if anything, we created Summer Game Fest because we saw the wheels feeling off the wagon of E3.” He wasn’t gloating. This is a guy who loved E3 enough that he called it heartbreaking to watch it fall apart. “For two decades, E3 was part of my life, since I was 15 years old. I went to every show. I loved it, and it defined my summer.”

So what actually happened? The ESA, the trade organization that ran E3, spent the late 2010s trying to reposition the show as a “fan, media and influencer festival” right as the companies that actually mattered were losing interest in a physical trade show model built around press badges and closed-door meetings. Sony pulled out of E3 entirely in 2019 and never came back. Keighley himself opted out of E3 2020, saying he didn’t feel comfortable with the direction things were heading. Then COVID hit, E3 2020 got cancelled, and the ESA never managed to put together a real virtual replacement. E3 2021 and 2022 limped along in reduced form. E3 2023 was cancelled outright, officially due to “resourcing challenges,” but everyone in the industry knew the real story: the show had lost its reason to exist.

As one commenter on a gaming forum put it during the fallout, and I think about this a lot: “Everyone just started doing digital events at a fraction of the cost of live events. Sucks for us as the fans but I get it from a company standpoint.” That’s exactly right. E3’s entire business model was built around companies needing a shared physical space to reach press and consumers at the same time. Once every major publisher could livestream directly to millions of people on YouTube and Twitch for a fraction of the cost of a convention floor booth, the entire economic logic of E3 evaporated. Nobody needed the middleman anymore.

What We Actually Get Now Is More Games, Less Waiting

Here’s my honest, unfiltered fan opinion: the current showcase season structure gives me more actual game content than E3 ever did, and it gives it to me faster.

Old E3 meant three or four days of back-to-back press conferences, most of which were bloated with corporate fluff, sports statistics slides, and executives thanking their teams before you got to the actual game footage. You’d sit through forty minutes of Ubisoft talking about “player engagement metrics” to get four minutes of actual gameplay you cared about. The show floor was incredible if you were physically there, but if you were watching from home, and most of us were, you were mainlining hours of stage presentations hoping the good stuff was coming soon.

Summer Game Fest 2026, by contrast, is Geoff Keighley and co-host Lucy James running a tight, curated main show from the Dolby Theatre, immediately followed across the same week by a PlayStation State of Play, a standalone Xbox Games Showcase, and a Nintendo Direct, each one focused, each one moving fast, each one built around the assumption that you are there for the games and nothing else. Persona 6. Final Fantasy VII Revelation. God of War: Laufey. The Blood of Dawnwalker. Fable. All of it, across one concentrated week, without the padding.

I am not spending four days of my life watching press conferences anymore. I am spending a very focused week getting hit with genuinely exciting news, back to back, from every corner of the industry, and I can watch all of it from my couch without needing a $1,000 flight to Los Angeles and a press badge I will never qualify for.

Nintendo and Sony Realized They Never Needed the Room in the First Place

One of the things that made the death of E3 permanent rather than temporary is that once PlayStation and Nintendo tried operating without it, they realized they were better off. In 2026, PlayStation and Nintendo did not participate in the official Summer Game Fest event at all. They ran their own standalone shows instead: a State of Play on June 2 and a Nintendo Direct on June 9, bookending Summer Game Fest’s main event on June 5 like their own separate mini-festivals.

This is the part that I think actually matters most for understanding why E3 is not coming back in any real form. Nintendo Directs specifically became the gold standard for how a company should talk to its own fans: focused, no filler, straight to the games, released on the company’s own schedule with zero dependency on a third-party convention calendar. Once Nintendo, Sony, and eventually Xbox all figured out that they could build their own hype, control their own narrative, and reach a bigger global audience through their own YouTube channel than through a shared convention floor, there was no reason to ever go back to sharing a stage with their competitors again.

As a fan, I actually prefer this. I know exactly when to tune in for Nintendo news because Nintendo tells me. I don’t have to wade through three unrelated publishers to get to the fifteen minutes I actually care about. The individual showcase model respects my time in a way E3’s kitchen-sink format never did.

The Discourse Is Still There. Maybe Even Better.

People who miss E3 always bring up the crowd energy, and I get it, I genuinely do. There is something E3 had that Summer Game Fest structurally cannot replicate: a room full of thousands of people from every corner of the industry, together, in real time, losing their minds simultaneously. That specific electricity, the sound of an entire convention center gasping at the same moment, is gone, and no livestream chat scrolling at the speed of light will ever be the same thing.

But here’s my counterpoint as someone who actually engages with this stuff online now instead of just watching it happen: the current model has replaced physical crowd energy with something almost as good, digital discourse at a scale E3 never had. When Summer Game Fest drops a surprise Kojima appearance or a Persona 6 tease, the reaction isn’t contained to one room in Los Angeles anymore. It’s millions of people across Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok reacting in real time, together, from every country with an internet connection. That’s not a smaller version of the E3 crowd. In terms of pure scale, it’s a bigger one. It’s just distributed instead of concentrated in one auditorium.

And honestly, some of the “juicy discourse about the state of the gaming industrial complex,” to borrow a phrase from a recent Kotaku preview, has never been better. We get to actually talk to each other about what we just saw in real time, form theories together, dissect trailers frame by frame with people who care as much as we do, instead of just clapping in a room and going home.

Nobody Is Pretending This Is Perfect

I want to be honest here because a fan article that pretends everything about this transition is flawless isn’t a fan article, it’s a press release. There are real losses.

The show floor is genuinely gone, and that matters. E3’s best-kept secret was never the press conferences, it was the show floor itself: getting actual hands-on time with upcoming games months before release, waiting in absurd lines for fifteen minutes with a controller in your hands that told you more about a game than any trailer could. Summer Game Fest and its satellite showcases are almost entirely a broadcast experience. Unless you’re one of the very few people who can afford $300 resale tickets for nosebleed seats at the Dolby Theatre, you are watching a screen, not touching a controller.

There’s also something to the criticism that the current landscape feels “splintered,” as Keighley himself put it. Instead of one unified event everyone circled on their calendar, we now have a rolling sequence of showcases across multiple weeks that requires genuine effort to track: Summer Game Fest, State of Play, Xbox Games Showcase, Nintendo Direct, Day of the Devs, and a growing list of smaller thematic showcases for specific communities and regions. If you’re not a person who actively follows gaming news, it is genuinely easier to miss something now than it was when everything happened in one place over one week.

And yeah, some of the old E3 magic really is gone. The sheer scale of a unified industry event, warts and all, created moments that felt bigger than any individual company’s own showcase can replicate. I miss that. I think a lot of us do.

Why I’m Still Mostly Okay With How This Turned Out

As a fan, here’s where I’ve landed after years of watching this play out. E3 was, at its best, a genuinely special once-a-year event. But it was also bloated, expensive to produce, increasingly disconnected from how people actually wanted to consume gaming news, and dependent on a business model that stopped making sense the moment publishers realized they could talk directly to their audience without a middleman taking a cut of the attention.

Summer Game Fest, whatever its imperfections, actually understood the assignment. It started, in Keighley’s own words, “at home in a spare bedroom,” built by someone who loved the old thing enough to notice it was dying and build something functional in its place before the entire summer showcase season “splintered apart” entirely. It is leaner, faster, more focused on the actual games, and more accessible to more fans around the world than E3 ever managed to be in its final decade.

I miss the room. I miss the specific, singular electricity of E3 at its peak. But I do not miss forty-minute keynotes about quarterly engagement metrics, and I do not miss waiting an entire year for information that now arrives in a tighter, better-paced, more game-focused burst every June.

E3 didn’t get replaced because something came along and beat it. It got replaced because it stopped giving fans what they actually wanted, and the people who still cared about connecting games to the people who play them built something that did. That’s not a tragedy. That’s just how it’s supposed to work.

Rest easy, E3. You gave us some incredible memories. But Summer Game Fest earned this.

Do you miss E3, or are you fully on board with the Summer Game Fest era? Drop your take in the comments — and let us know which showcase moment from this year hit you hardest.