It’s early June, which means it’s time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we’re smack dab in the middle of that programming right now.
We’re covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show’s in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between.
Through it all, we’re collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order.
Tuesday, June 3
State of Unreal: The Witcher IV and Fortnite AI
Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic’s own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED’s upcoming The Witcher IV.
The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we’ve heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5’s Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn’t quite on the scale of The Witcher III‘s Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved.
It’s fair to say that Fortnite‘s moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year.
Wednesday, June 4
PlayStation State of Play: Marvel Tōkon, Silent Hill f and the return of Lumines
Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony’s standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement.
The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It’s also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It’s being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It’s coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that’ll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026.
Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new… let’s call it aspirational “2026” date for Pragmata, which, if you’re keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom!
Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3, coming in 2026; Suda51’s new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man; and Lumines Arise, a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect.
Thursday, June 5
Diddly squat
There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that’s out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It’s probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.)
Friday, June 6
Summer Game Fest Live: Resident Evil Requiem, Stranger Than Heaven and sequels abound
It’s fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year’s showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell’s yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn’t show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements.
Perhaps the biggest of all was the “ninth” (Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village. Here’s hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6.
We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It’s now called Stranger Than Heaven, and there’s a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration.
Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart, Code Vein and Mortal Shell, and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX, a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game.
There were countless other announcements at the show, including:
Day of the Devs: Snap & Grab, Blighted and Escape Academy II
As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here.
Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it’s got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner.
Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted, a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren’t going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It’s your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots.
Here are some of the other games that caught our eye:
The rest: Ball x Pit, Hitman and 007 First Light
After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit. It’s the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun’s Hatbox. Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun’s mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there’s a demo on Steam available right now.
Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who’s been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia.
Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye, a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing.
Saturday, June 7
Monument Valley 3, eggs, Camper Van: Make it Home and niche streams
The Wholesome Direct arrived on Saturday, just in time to soothe that weird hangover we all got after the IOI showcase. The Wholesome Direct is a celebration of all things adorable, quaint, peaceful and sweet, and this year included mainstream news about Monument Valley 3 coming to consoles and PC, following a stint as a Netflix exclusive. There was also a release date announcement for the cozy but twisted shop-management sim Discounty, which is about as spooky as the Wholesome Direct ever gets. There’s something sinister about the small town in Discounty, and while we’re still not sure if it’s demons or just the looming specter of capitalism, we know for sure the game is coming to PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 21.
Meanwhile, Omelet You Cook hit Steam during the showcase as a nice little surprise. It’s a game about making eggs for picky students in a cafeteria, and of course pleasing Principal Clucker (who is a chicken, yes). Simply put, it looks delicious. The final game we want to shout out from this year’s Wholesome Direct is Camper Van: Make it Home, a perfect little crossover of interior design mechanics and slightly miniaturized objects, which makes for a super cute experience. It came out during the showcase, and it’s live now on Steam.
There were dozens of other announcements during the 2025 Wholesome Direct stream, and the entire thing is worth a watch. You can do so at your leisure, ideally cuddled up with a blanket and a nice drink, right here.
Saturday was also the time for all of the hyper-specific game streams to shine. We saw the Women-led Games show, Latin American Games Showcase, Southeast Asian Games Showcase, Green Games Showcase and Frosty Games Fest. Party!
Sunday, June 8
A new Xbox handheld, Outer Worlds 2 and Black Ops 7
The last big event of the weekend was Xbox, which had its usual breathless showcase. The major news, especially for a publication like Engadget, was the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, two new Xbox-focused PC handhelds. Internally, they’re a lot like ASUS’ ROG Ally handhelds, but the grips have been smoothed out to feel more like an Xbox controller in your hands.
The software experience is also different. The Xbox Ally handhelds run Windows 11, but in Microsoft‘s version of Steam Big Picture mode there’ll be fewer background processes and… just a generally lower overhead compared to regular Windows handhelds. Thankfully, Microsoft isn’t locking things down, as it’ll be able to access other “popular storefronts,” which we’re taking to mean Steam and Epic. The Xbox Ally will be available closer to the holidays, but price is a huge question mark: The ROG Ally costs significantly more than the Steam Deck and Switch 2. Is Microsoft going to subsidize these things, or are they going to cost $600-$800 like ASUS’ own-brand versions?
Side note: A quick screw you to Microsoft for using Hollow Knight: Silksong to show off the new handheld. We’re all starving out here, and this was not helpful. I guess the news that it’ll be playable on day one on the handheld at least narrows down the release date to “between now and whenever this thing comes out.”
Less of a surprise was Outer Worlds 2, which Microsoft said would be at the show well ahead of time. We got a release date — October 29 — and a deep dive into the game’s new systems. It looks like an expanded title compared to the original, with an improved combat system and a more fleshed out set of companions. We hope to have more on what’s new real soon.
The One More Thing of the show was a new Call of Duty game, Black Ops 7. Truly, when a game comes out every year is it really worth blowing your one more thing on? If only Microsoft had an Xbox-branded handheld to show off, that would’ve been a really cool note to end the show!
Here are the other bits and pieces worth reading about from the Xbox show:
The rest: Paralives and Blippo+
Paralives has been in the works for what feels like forever, but you’ll be able to play it this year: It enters early access on December 8. The indie take on The Sims looks charming as all hell in its latest trailer, and I can’t wait.
Blippo+ has been a great distraction since it launched with Playdate season 2, and we found out Sunday that it’ll be coming to more platforms soon — in full color, no less! It’ll arrive on PC and Nintendo Switch in fall 2025.
Monday, June 9
Now you’re all caught up. There’s just one event on Monday, and it’s the Black Voices in Gaming showcase. It starts at noon ET, and we’ve embedded the steam below for your viewing pleasure.
