Early June has been the season for new game reveals for over two decades. After the collapse of E3, Geoff Keighley has taken up the torch with his own show, Summer Games Fest.

It’s always been a weird show because Sony and Nintendo have been opting out of E3 for a while, and their absence has continued. Sony had their State of Play earlier this year, and while it had a decent lineup, there were barely games featured developed by Sony’s actual first-party studios.

Similarly, the release of Nintendo’s Switch 2 is largely lacking in new games actually made by Nintendo, outside of “Mario Kart World”. Microsoft is ready to fill the gap with their showcase on Sunday, and if it’s like their show last year, they could end up having the best lineup of the week.

In many ways, this year’s Summer Games Fest reflects the current state of the games industry in general; it’s a weird time. AAA game developers are trying to figure out what the next big moneymaker idea is, and the indie space is making more Metroidvanias and roguelikes while throwing all sorts of random ideas at the wall. On top of that, EVERYONE is making some kind of Souls clone.

It’s not really surprising, the last few years have seen a catastrophic number of developer layoffs, costs are getting higher, and customers are facing higher prices. The easy thing to do is to take the safe bets, which is what a lot of studios, big and small, are doing. Larger devs are making more Souls clones and live service co-op games, while smaller ones are pumping out more Metroidvanias and roguelike experiences.

Thankfully, there were some notable outliers. Capcom revealed “Resident Evil 9: Requiem”, which appears to have an aesthetic that’s new to the series. “Mouse P.I. For Hire” is an indie FPS with a vintage cartoon art style. RGG Studio, developers of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, also showed more of Project Century, now named Stranger Than Heaven, which features a detective walking a gaudy city (possibly in Japan) in 1943. As the working title implied, the story will jump around time periods with multiple protagonists.

By the time the show ended, it felt strange. Plenty of games were shown, a lot of which looked good or decent, but the thing that made E3 memorable was the big reveals. It’s great that so many small studios get to reveal their games on a big platform. At the same time, what are all those increased costs, prices, and layoffs contributing to if not the blockbusters people expect? That’s what’s been missing: the reveals that turn heads and get people talking, games that justify the hundreds of dollars spent on new hardware.

While it’s common for a publisher to show new games on their own streams, many of them still choose to reveal their games during one of Keighly’s big shows because of how many viewers they draw. I think these past two lackluster showings reinforce the idea that the industry is slowly figuring things out. It’s a process that has cost a lot of developers their jobs, and it’s left a lot of gamers wondering when things will ramp back up. It feels like all we can do is sit back and wait to see how it all shakes out, who’s left standing, and what attractions at the circus are left to throw some money at.