Another year, another new(ish) attempt to package up all the drama and hype from a typically stacked June hype season. Most of the usual suspects have shown up over the last three weeks to state their intent for the next 12 months or so, and even more than most years, each major videogame showcase holder now feels like their public position can be summed up by just a few words. So let’s start there and expand out a bit.

We’ll view each publisher through the lens of their presence over the whole news period where applicable, rather than just within their own individual showcases.

PLAYSTATION

STUCK BETWEEN TREND-CHASING AND CREATIVITY

Playstation’s modern showcase branding is a great idea on paper: the “State of Play” shows are meant to be shorter and smaller in scale than the full-on “Playstation Showcase” presentations, and this divide is meant to help manage expectations. But the wide range of lucrative partnerships Sony can call on these days, in conjunction with the company’s understandable desire to appeal to casual fans and shareholders, have meant the reality doesn’t always line up that way. The limited PS Showcases this decade have felt bloated in places, and yet State of Play line-ups are often packing megaton reveals the calibre of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy.

So when you announce that a State of Play is set to air mere days before Summer Game Fest gets into full swing, people are going to look at it with a strong degree of hype – unfairly or not. And using a third of your runtime on a derivative first-party hero shooter and the third-party competitor destined to cannibalise it is certainly a choice that is going to earn the ire of a fair few viewers.

Concord may look like it has the funding and ex-Destiny development talent to hit big for Sony, but there is just nothing about the last few years in online PvP gaming trends to suggest that it will do anything but flounder upon release. The rules for what succeeds and what fails in the live service game space seem increasingly luck-based every year, so maybe its distinctly Guardians of the Galaxy-inspired character energy will hit with players. In the year of Helldivers II, the fact that it isn’t free-to-play may not be the problem it once was, either. But odds are still against it in the face of fierce competition, not least of which will likely come from another hero shooter shown in the very same conference: Marvel Rivals.

When you are the console publisher that gave the world Uncharted, The Last of Us, Horizon, the rebooted God of War, and Ghost of Tsushima among other stellar single-player stories, choosing to open your big summer show with a lengthy look at a live-service multiplayer title, you are going to look like you’re chasing trends.

Luckily, this first cab off the showcase rank also gave us one of the biggest highlights of the entire season: Astro Bot. That’s right, just Astro Bot. The adorable mascot-in-waiting carries no subtitle for his third adventure, and that’s a clear statement of intent to go along with the game’s near-full-price release strategy and primetime September 6th release date. As a former Nintendo kid I do not say this lightly, but this looks like it could be Mario-level good. The PS5 has been crying out for another family-friendly exclusive to go with 2021’s excellent Ratchet entry, and the choice to close the State of Play with such a wildly creative project indicates that old golden-age Sony is still in there.

The sheer contrast in tone between the opening and closing first-party segments of the show may have dominated the headlines, but there was more tasty third-party stuff in there worth keeping an eye on too. We saw yet another incredible-looking Chinese action game in the form of Where Winds Meet, the first of many, many new “Soulslikes” for the season with the multiplayer-focused Ballad of Antara, and a gnarly gameplay preview of the highly-anticipated Path of Exile II.

Omega Force also showed up with what will be the first new mainline Dynasty Warriors entry in seven years, titled Origins; it was an appearance almost as out-of-the-blue as the massive increase in visual quality over prior instalments. Silent Hill 2 also got an appropriate October release date, but opinions are apparently still mixed on that one. I never played the original, but I adored Bloober Team’s The Medium so I’ll be there.

As for Playstation’s presence outside its own branded presentation this season, the biggest eyebrow-raiser came with the title card at the very end of the Lego Horizon Adventures trailer that opened the Summer Game Fest main show. The unlikely family-friendly collaboration launching on PC is hardly surprising given Sony’s recent public comments to investors about widening the reach of their games, but the unmistakable red Nintendo Switch logo was an additional layer almost no one was expecting – all the juicier for the lack of an Xbox jewel to go alongside it. The game looks great, by the way, and that brings us to…

GEOFF

LIGHT ON BIG HITS BUT SELF-AWARE AND IMPROVING

Geoff Keighley’s big Summer Game Fest kickoff showcase was certainly a stark reminder that 2024 is a hangover year of sorts for big expensive third-party gaming fare, but it still brought its fair share of worthwhile moments as well as meaningful improvements to Keighley’s well-worn show format.

There’s a discussion to be had as to whether all his presentations need to be over two hours in length, but 2024’s SGF show still leveraged one of his now-famous close professional connections for a truly beautiful Alan Wake II double-reveal: a much-appreciated physical (and collectors) edition of the game alongside an unhinged triple-barrelled “out in 24 hours” DLC announcement that wiped out the disappointment of 2023’s relative lack of June shadow drops in one clean hit. Throwback beat-em-up Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind also went off for me personally, as did the super-weird gameplay debut for Slitterhead (from a bunch of ex-Silent Hill devs) and the announcement of Fatal Fury characters coming to Street Fighter 6.

The widest-reaching announcements were probably the CG teaser for Civilization VII, the surprising reveal of Valorant console ports, and the first attempt at a Quidditch game in decades. Aside from those, the flavour of the show was largely release dates and updates on games we already know about (October 11th is looking stacked for Japanese games) and a more indie-centric presence than usual, which is no bad thing – especially this year. Geoff’s opening monologue focused on job losses in the industry and the success of breakout indie projects on Steam so far in 2024 may have been a little stiff, but it’s not the kind of shout-out you’d find from any of the other big American summer gaming conferences.

These days I’m finding Geoff’s intermittent commentary increasingly useful as a reminder of what game projects have and haven’t already been announced (and how long ago), but it was still getting a bit stale to see him presenting almost every single reveal, so the decision to bring fighting game / JRPG streamer Curiousjoi on stage for a sprinkling of variety paid off. The obligatory ads were also spaced out in mercifully short clusters not unlike a traditional TV broadcast, which made them much more tolerable in my eyes (although what on earth was going on with that star-studded Squad Busters mobile game trailer? It was funny, sure, but gameplay was extremely minimal).

The presence of two dedicated indie publishing blocks felt like an efficient and exciting way to package fresh reveals: the Among Us-funded OuterSloth collective immediately looks like a label to watch, and Blumhouse Games essentially stole the show for almost any player who has enjoyed a horror game in the past several years. Every single one of the games they flashed before our eyes looks intriguing and unique.

I got what I expected out of SGF this year, and a few things I definitely didn’t; that’s good enough for me in this climate. Hopefully Geoff can continue the momentum of his format improvements into this year’s Game Awards stream – and give the winners more time in the sun while he’s at it.

XBOX

OUT OF EXCUSES BUT PACKED WITH OLD-SCHOOL E3 HYPE

Oh boy, there’s a lot to say about this one.

As soon as the 90-minute Xbox Games Showcase wrapped up and the dedicated Black Ops 6 Direct presentation began, I had three dominant thoughts: that show looked expensive, the long-suffering Xbox fans from the dominant 360 days were eating good, and that show might have been even better than last year’s. First-person single-player adventures stood front and centre, western development houses made up almost the entirety of the runtime, and long-absent franchises with big-name recognition showed up to impress. The blowout was paced to perfection as well, with all the “less exciting” obligatory game updates trimmed and sprinkled throughout. Perhaps at the cost of dramatic genre (and budget) variety, it’s hard to dispute Xbox came out swinging in 2024.

The context for this impressive salvo, of course, is a year of extremely poor press for the Xbox brand – maybe even their worst since that disastrous Xbox One unveiling over a decade ago. A climate of rapidly-changing yet vague business plans made worse by deteriorating communication with their customer base came to a head recently with the closure of mid-budget Bethesda studios Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, which makes the limited presence of charming “small projects” at this year’s showcase look remarkably deliberate. Still, the gloom around unproven and/or unwieldy first-party titles like South of Midnight and State of Decay 3 – both of which showed spectacularly – as well as Clockwork Revolution, Ara: History Untold and Towerborne – which were entirely absent – will not lift until Xbox pumps the brakes on closing lower-budget studios after they release games. That’s a reality everyone at Xbox will have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

But even within that cautious context, it’s hard to look at what Playstation or even Geoff Keighley served up this year and argue they even came close to matching the hype levels of the squad in green. Forget the literal opening and closing of the show with CoD; the “inner shell” of the presentation brought the house down by kicking off with a gnarly gameplay debut for the medieval-set Doom: The Dark Ages, and closed with a tease for Gears of War: E-Day so perfectly executed to capitalise on series nostalgia that it should be studied in a marketing museum.

In between those titanic pillars we got more tongue-in-cheek Fable goodness (now with gameplay and even more British comedians!), a hefty Blizzard presence in the form of gorgeous World of Warcraft and Diablo IV expansion trailers, a stylish final trailer for the surprisingly imminent Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, the glorious return of Age of Mythology, short sharp trailers for the customary updates to Fallout 76, Sea of Thieves and The Elder Scrolls Online, not one mention of a Forza title, and only three total cuts to an executive on a stage. This show was aimed squarely at the jaded and scorned 2000s Xbox generation who want action and story front and centre. Boy howdy, they got just that.

Massive western publishers Ubisoft and EA kept that party going by showing up with trailers for 2024 megaton titles Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Dragon Age: The Veilguard respectively, and Konami surprised many after initially teasing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater at a Playstation event by showing off some gameplay (and a glorious David Hayter voiceover) at this Xbox presser. That was essentially it for Japanese presence, however, which helped contribute to the showcase’s unbalanced feel for me personally – though I am naturally biased on that front.

And on that note, one of my three personal favourite moments from the breakneck-pace extravaganza came with the shocking gameplay debut of the rebooted Perfect Dark. Admittedly that’s an IP with so little identity to offer the modern Xbox brand that it might as well become this unlikely hybrid of Deus Ex and Mirror’s Edge, but in the talented hands of my beloved Crystal Dynamics that looks exactly like the kind of game for me. So does the Aussie-developed coming-of-age tune-fuelled Mixtape, and so does the complete left-field sucker punch Clair Obscura: Expedition 33. The latter is probably my pick for the most exciting new IP of the whole June hype season, with an immediately alluring story setup, intriguing hybrid battle system, immense visual chops, and show-stopping Ben Starr voiceover.

Many of the games shown were dated for 2025 or not at all, but that doesn’t mean 2024 suffered all that much either. After a muted few months, the remainder of this very year now looks pretty great for Game Pass. We have the aforementioned Flintlock in July, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Heart of Chernobyl in September, Flight Simulator 2024 in November, not to mention Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Starfield: Shattered Space, and whatever else Xbox decides to announce at their next event set to fill in the remaining 2024 slots. It appears the dam has finally burst and is about to commence that mythical “steady stream” of Xbox games that was promised for so long, even if it may have already arrived too late to save the brand as a traditional console maker.

Oh yeah, the single-player campaign of the new Call of Duty legitimately looks fantastic, and I don’t see myself shrugging the series off like I did last year – especially because it’s on Game Pass now. Long live Treyarch and Raven; long live Black Ops.

As if the main show wasn’t enough, Xbox also filled out the ensuing week with one major deep dive of an upcoming game per day, which was a cool touch. The Avowed showcase in particular presented an excellent breakdown that drew even my CRPG-resistant eye. It’s notoriously difficult to show off slower RPGs in quick trailers, so this half-hour of vivid colours, flashy combat and varied mission approaches was just what the doctor ordered.

UBISOFT

FOCUSED ON TWO BIG GAMES WITH ALL THE REST SHAVED DOWN

Ubisoft’s era of low-key relative silence is evidently long behind us now, and it now feels like it was over almost as soon as it began. With the allegorical anchor of Skull & Bones at last cast off to sea, the French giants are back to the kind of business that makes a June showcase make sense once more. And mercifully, the 2024 presentation was lean and focused on games. With far less onstage rambling from talking heads, some remarkably quick segments on already-established games, and shockingly not a single Just Dance appearance, this trimmed-down show absolutely destroyed last year’s wishy-washy effort.

The lion’s share of the 1-hour runtime was lodged firmly in three places: an extremely welcome block of Prince of Persia news in the middle of the piece (where we got our first acknowledgement of the Sands of Time remake project in years, and it looks like it’s essentially been fully restarted), and two classic Ubisoft unbroken gameplay slices for a pair of 2024 releases that surely stand above everything else as the company’s highest-profile games of the decade. They were absolutely treated as such in any case, as both opener and closer featured live music introductions in the mould of the golden age of Playstation pressers.

The beginning was devoted to Star Wars Outlaws, and while some media previews a day later showed concern for the game’s mechanical depth, that very much seems like the point of this game the way I see it: make the “first ever open world Star Wars game” as accessible as possible and give players a swashbuckling scoundrel tale with a Ubisoft open-world flavour. The title continues to impress visually, and the variety on hand looks solid, but the reviews will certainly be interesting as to how it holds up after a dozen hours or so.

As for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, I’ll confess I’ve been mentally checked out for the last decade of RPG-esque entries in the series, but this one has me enthralled. It’s not just the Japanese setting, at long last – although that is a huge factor – but the next-generation evolution of the simultaneous two-character focus from my favourite Assassin’s Creed game, 2015’s Syndicate. The unique benefits of playing as shinobi Naoe versus samurai Yasuke were on show clear as day, and I look forward to making liberal use of the character swap features when the game rounds out the (suddenly rather stacked) year in mid-November.

Following the Xbox showcase in the running order was never going to be easy, but it must be said this was a well-paced show from Ubisoft, and all things considered you arguably couldn’t have asked much more from the controversial publisher on this occasion. Except maybe for Just Dance, but that surprisingly showed up with…

NINTENDO

WHAT NEW CONSOLE?

So hey, it turns out that after scheduling almost a game per month for the entire first half of this year, then telling everyone in early May that there would be no talk about the Switch’s hardware successor for a while yet, Nintendo did, in fact, have actual games left for their current console over the rest of 2024. Someone fan me gently; I’m about to pass out from shock.

While the Nintendo Direct presentation that unofficially wrapped up the three-week June hype season was by no means the company’s best-ever, reasonable expectations were low enough in the eighth (!) year of the Nintendo Switch that it didn’t matter; fans still had plenty of surprising developments to chew on. It was a very good show, and given Nintendo’s almost complete absence from every other major showcase this year, that kinda needed to happen if the Kyoto giant wanted to avoid a burial under the landslide of other exciting game reveals.

Starting and finishing with significant franchise returns alongside another couple right in the middle, peppered with a surprisingly low amount of remasters / remakes, decorated with variety from all kinds of publishing partners and paced typically relentlessly at a mere 40 minutes, Nintendo’s production on this Direct was a sharp reminder of why other publishers have been chasing their format for years. And in the current climate of long western development cycles and mass layoffs, the benefits of keeping multiple teams in your first-party stable ticking over with low turnover and reasonable budgets were clear to see – even if the left-field show-opening return of a presumed-dead franchise comes a few years after the demise of its former steward, AlphaDream.

It must be said that Mario & Luigi: Brothership is looking so fabulously in-line with the series’ uniquely manic energy that you have to wonder if former AlphaDream developers are working on the game. Regardless, Nintendo is clearly very confident in Mario RPGs at the moment because there are a lot of them coming out (I’m certainly not complaining), and this one is in the prime November release slot.

The important September and October slots will be filled with two more new games doing exciting things with familiar groundwork: a packed multiplayer juggernaut blending nostalgia and new ideas via Super Mario Party Jamboree in the latter, and in the former the first-ever Legend of Zelda game starring the titular character herself, Echoes of Wisdom. The 21st mainline game in the series looks like exactly the kind of fresh take on 2D Zelda world design I’ve been dreaming of for a while, and I for one am locked in – although that beautiful art direction previously used for 2019’s Link’s Awakening remake has already shown it doesn’t always run well on the Switch, so questions remain over how it will perform.

The long-awaited return of Metroid Prime 4 – now subtitled Beyond – represented a collective sigh of relief from an entire community of people wondering if the game was dead, and it sure does look like it will release on the current Switch as promised – albeit in 2025. But its thunder was almost stolen for me just before the end by yet another bonkers character-driven title from the Danganronpa team, only now with tasty tactics gameplay in tow; The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is set for next year.

Other surprises included the promise of a console port of Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a shadow-dropped free update to last year’s acclaimed Disney Illusion Island, the incoming addition of basketball to Nintendo Switch Sports, the hilarious return of Denpa Men, and the even more hilarious western debut of the N64 Online “Mature” app, complete with our second appearance of Perfect Dark for the month – who had that on their bingo card?

Nintendo’s first-party calendar is now so full of games with concrete release dates that the traditional Tokyo Game Show-adjacent Nintendo Direct in September doesn’t even feel necessary. Well, at least as far as the current Switch is concerned. Cue raised eyebrows?

EA, SQUARE ENIX & CAPCOM

WISE TO STEP BACK

In 2024, the trio of traditional third party publishers with chequered histories with their own June press conferences had a pretty good time without the glare of the direct spotlight – for the most part.

EA had precisely two titles ripe for discussion, but one looked considerably riper than the other. Skate‘s long-awaited debut gameplay trailer at Summer Game Fest may have been packaged up hilariously, with the considerable comedic talents of Tim Robinson unleashed to the effect of a bonus I Think You Should Leave sketch, but the game itself still looks “Pre-Pre-Alpha” rough. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, on the other hand, had a strong reveal at the Xbox showcase, packed with the kind of personality that BioWare used to excel at. Then a couple of days later came the full gameplay blowout, and my goodness, does it look handsome. It’s probably fair to say the combat style is also much more action-focused than most people would’ve expected, and either way it sure got people talking. A smart play from EA overall.

Square Enix showed some restraint of its own and managed to pull off a couple of neat surprises in the process. The drop of an all-new Life is Strange title – let alone one returning to Max Caulfield’s story – so soon before release in the form of Double Exposure was a genuine out-of-nowhere shock tucked into a pocket of that amazing Xbox show, and shortly before that the company finally addressed the super-weird availability imbalance of the Octopath Traveler games by bringing the first game to Playstation, the second to Xbox, and adding both to Game Pass. Then a Visions of Mana trailer dropped independently, with its long-awaited – and rather smart – release date confirmed as August 29th.

Square’s seasonal involvement concluded in fine fashion with a significant presence at the Nintendo Direct, at long last freeing RPG Site’s 2021 game of the year from the Apple Arcade dungeon in the upgraded, voice-acted form of Fantasian: Neo Dimension, announcing a full 3D remake of Romancing SaGa 2, and giving Yuji Horii himself some face time for the show-stoppingly gorgeous reappearance of Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake (not sure about that wordy title myself) and a tease of its forthcoming I and II buddies. With a lineup like that, Square probably could have done their own show, but I’m sure Xbox and Nintendo are glad they didn’t.

As for the hot-handed Capcom, well they had a presence through just about every other major showcase, and they were all the better for it. The company’s recent move towards its own dedicated show just was not working, but their current quality-focused game release cadence absolutely is, so they essentially sat back and watched other presenters do their work for them. And based on Monster Hunter Wilds alone, they absolutely should be kicking back with a drink or two right about now. A proper gameplay debut at the Sony State of Play, a story-focused trailer at SGF, and what felt like a million glowing previews a few days later – 2025 can’t come soon enough.

Except it can, because shrewd Game Pass pickup Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess got an incredibly ideal July 19th, 2024 release date. I may be the only person I know excited for that trippy action/tower defense hybrid curiosity, and Capcom is clearly putting most of their marketing budget elsewhere, but at least I won’t need to pester my friends to join me in order to enjoy this one, unlike last year’s July Capcom game. The company’s classic cataloguing game hasn’t dropped either, as they announced both Ace Attorney Investigations Collection (all series entries are now finally available in the west!) and Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection at the Nintendo Direct – both of which look clean. They are doing plenty of things right over at Capcom right now, and one of them is avoiding their own showcase for now.

EVERYONE ELSE

VOLVY AND FRIENDS

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t crawling around like my normal gremlin self this year watching every single showcase, so I’m not up on too many hidden gems from the PC Games Show, Wholesome Direct, Future Gaming Show or other similarly budgeted productions. I was, however, shocked to see the unattached announcement of a current-gen Yooka-Laylee remaster, of all things, which dropped on its own during the lead-up to SGF. I was also thrilled to play the limited-time demo of Metal Slug Tactics as part of Steam Next Fest, which seems to indicate the game is a lot less dead than some thought – and it’s still mighty exciting.

I did watch through the always-excellent Day of the Devs show and wishlisted almost every single game featured; I’m particularly excited for Petal Runner, Zoochosis, and While Waiting. But the last word must naturally go to the Devolver Direct, which was bleakly hilarious as usual, though in more of a focused horror-spoof kind of way this year. I’m going to have that Volvy theme song stuck in my head for a while. As always, I recommend watching it in its entirety:

And that’s another year of June videogame hype in the books! If you’ll excuse me, I need to get the calendar out for the rest of the year; I’ve got time-budgeting to do.