Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget, where you can expect a new story every Monday, divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to short essays and musings about video game trends and related topics from my perspective as a reporter with over 13 years of experience covering the industry. The second part will bring you the most important video game stories from the past week, including headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy, and I’ll see you next week.
As we dive into the week of Summer Game Fest, I find myself entangled in a complex web of embargoes, meetings, schedules, and cryptic invites. The familiar, plasticky, sanitized air of video game conventions is already palpable. The scent of pixels is in the air.
This marks my third Summer Game Fest, and I’m eagerly anticipating it, as usual. I appreciate the event’s focus on independent projects, diverse creators, and smaller-scale publishers, particularly with shows like Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, Women-Led Games, and the Latin American and Southeast Asian games showcases. In my view, innovation in the industry stems from these untethered, experimental spaces, and Summer Game Fest has consistently provided a platform for these experiences to shine.
I have an even greater appreciation for Summer Game Fest after spending seven years covering the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) at the Los Angeles Convention Center. While E3 was exciting in its own right, and I feel privileged to have attended it numerous times, it was also a soulless kind of show. E3 was unwelcoming to independent creators and dominated by corporate swag. By the time Sony stopped attending in 2019, it felt like an expensive, out-of-touch misrepresentation of the video game industry as a whole. The best parts of E3 in its final years were the unaffiliated events hosted by Devolver Digital, which took place in a nearby parking lot filled with Airstream trailers, food trucks, and fabulous, up-and-coming indie games – an atmosphere that felt a lot like Summer Game Fest.
I wrote about this phenomenon in 2018, questioning whether the video game industry needed E3 at all. Perhaps due to my intuition or the pandemic, E3 ceased to exist as an in-person show in 2020 and never re-emerged. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) hosted a virtual session in 2021 but nothing afterward, and E3 was officially declared dead in December 2023. Meanwhile, the video game market has continued to grow, driven by a maturing indie segment, mobile play, and harsh crunch-layoff cycles at the AAA level.
Now, the ESA is back with a new video game showcase called iicon, the Interactive Innovation Conference, scheduled for Las Vegas in April 2026. The industry’s biggest names are involved, including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, Disney, Amazon, and Take-Two Interactive. According to ESA President Stanley Pierre-Louis, the show is poised to be “a space for visionaries across industries to come together.” This sounds like E3 2.0, and it appears to be as AAA-focused as ever. Summer Game Fest, on the other hand, has its own version of a AAA thought-leader summit this year with The Game Business Live.
Meanwhile, the ESA has remained silent – even when directly asked – as some of the industry’s most influential companies roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This is happening at a time when women, POC, and LGBT+ employees are facing active existential threats, and it’s occurring during Pride Month, no less.
All of this is to say that I’m excited for Summer Game Fest this year. It kicks off with a live show on Friday, June 6, and we have a rundown of the full schedule right here. We’ll be publishing hands-on previews, developer interviews, and news directly from Summer Game Fest over the weekend and beyond, so stay tuned to Engadget’s Gaming hub.
The News
Playtonic Layoffs
Playtonic, the studio behind Yooka-Laylee, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees across multiple departments, including production, art, game design, narrative design, and UI/UX. In a message shared on X, the studio’s leaders stated, “This isn’t simply a difficult moment, it’s a period of profound change in how games are created and financed. The landscape is shifting, and with it, so must we.” Playtonic’s latest game, Yooka-Replaylee, is due to be released this year. Although Playtonic is a small, privately-owned company (with a minority investment from Tencent), the timing of the layoffs aligns with the established playbook of many AAA studios, which operate with periods of crunch and bulk layoffs baked into their business plans.
EA Cancels Black Panther
Electronic Arts announced plans to develop a single-player, third-person Black Panther game in 2023 as part of a broader Marvel push. However, it seems those plans have changed. EA has canceled its Black Panther project and closed the studio that was developing it, Cliffhanger Games. EA Motive, the team behind the stellar Dead Space remake, is still working on an Iron Man game, as far as we know.
