I vividly remember the moment I truly realized Summer Game Fest 2025 was a rotten event and an example of the industry trying to pretend everything is alright.
It was when the trailer for the upcoming third-person generic action game MindsEye started playing. The trailer included a new, slow, somber cover of “Madworld”—a song that was covered already and became infamous for its usage in the original Gears of War marketing campaign. That was when I realized the vibes were off. Everyone was running on fumes. People were desperate. Geoff, the master of throwing big, glitzy game events, was unable this time to distract from the truth: Things aren’t all right in the game industry.
But even before that, this year’s Summer Game Fest was a boring slog. It was a show dominated by the same kinds of games getting announced and showcased over and over and over. There were six trailers for six different Souls-like/Elden Ring-inspired games. A ton of anime action things that blended together. A trailer for a Fortnite Star Wars event. A Deadpool VR game. A Game of Thrones RTS. And a bunch of trailers for things that are already out or about to be released. The two-hour event (YEAH) dragged on and on, with each time a trailer ended the crowd sounded far less enthused about being there.
Sure, we got a fun Resident Evil 9 reveal, and there were a few cool games announced during the show, like a puppet boxing game, and Jurassic World Evolution 3 looks neat. But there was also a segment where a guy walked up in a hat that read “Make FPS Great Again” and yelled about Call of Duty being the same after claiming he just wanted to make another Halo.
Even Hideo Kojima, a guy who can usually bring a really awesome trailer for Geoff’s shows, appeared with little excitement, showed off a two-minute clip of people talking in Death Stranding 2, and left. The only mention of Silksong was a joke about it being absent. It was an empty show that felt lifeless and sad. It’s clear that publishers are chasing trends and only greenlighting and funding games that look like other things that people bought.
Geoff, wearing what appeared to be $750 sneakers, seemed desperate from the jump to convince fans watching at home that the lack of big AAA games wasn’t a bad thing. He dedicated the opening minutes of the show to praising indie games and how awesome they are and how popular they are. In hindsight, this was him setting the stage for his viewers: You aren’t getting Half-Life 3, GTA 6, or anything else like that tonight. Those games take 10 years to make now and come less often than ever before. And whle I do agree indie games are cool and doing awseome stuff, this showcase sucked. Two hours of the same games squeezed between ads is a horrible way to showcase anything. And doing it for this long should be classified as torture.
As summed up recently and perfectly by Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath:
Games—or at least the kind of games this week used to be about—are trapped in the belly of the machine. We love to talk shit about Andrew Wilson, but he isn’t to blame for every terrible decision at EA, because he’s the executive of a publicly-traded company in 2025, and any other person in his line of work would and is doing the same thing. Almost every major industry in the world, whether it’s games or cars or music or energy, is now at the mercy of Wall Street Weirdos, private equity in particular. We’re not looking at a bad time for the video game industry, we’re looking at just bad times.
But hey, Resident Evil 9 looks neat, I guess.
