Specifically, the official QuakeCon Twitter has announced that the event would remain exclusively digital for the time being, albeit with a hopeful note for the subsequent years. While the decision is fairly sound, according to information posted in the announcement, it’s clear that Bethesda’s Starfield might not be getting the sort of pre-release hype it otherwise may have commanded.
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According to the announcement, QuakeCon 2022 will be held on August 18-20, and won’t be making a return to Dallas after all. Even though the ongoing pandemic is slowly easing off in most territories, the QuakeCon team needed to make a decision well ahead of time, while there was still plenty of uncertainty surrounding the virus. This mirrors last year’s events, when it was announced that QuakeCon 2021 would be digital-only, which was in turn a continuation of 2020’s digital-only QuakeCon.
For Bethesda, this couldn’t have been an easy decision to make, as the cancellation of E3 affected Starfield by default. Setting the interstellar version of Elder Scrolls and Fallout aside for a bit, however, the company has got plenty of games it would have been thrilled to show off to a live audience, such as Arkane Studios’ Redfall. Instead, these showcases will remain digital this time around.
The messaging surrounding this year’s cancellation of live QuakeCon was careful to mention that the 2023 event is almost certain to be a fully-fledged in-person convention. After all, even though the gamers themselves shouldn’t worry about E3 becoming entirely irrelevant, these live events used to be crucial for game publishers both big and small, as it gave them an opportunity to hype up their products that’s now been replaced with simple trailer releases and internet conferencing.
In lieu of virtually every other major gaming convention, there’s Geoff Keighley’s own gaming showcase event, the Summer Game Fest. Though Summer Game Fest isn’t perfect in and of itself, it’s still a valuable avenue for gaming companies to explore, and may grow to become even more prominent over the coming years.
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