by Jessica Conditt,Mat Smith,Aaron Souppouris from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics on (#6XTTN)
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 3State of Unreal: The Witcher IV and Fortnite AIEpic 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 4PlayStation State of Play: Marvel Tkon, Silent Hill f and the return of LuminesAnother 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 Tkon: 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 5Diddly squatThere 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 6Summer Game Fest Live: Resident Evil Requiem, Stranger Than Heaven and sequels aboundIt'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: