Source:
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/geoff-keighley-details-the-game-awards-2021-and-beyond
For those who play, make, invest in, and critique video games, The Game Awards takes over Dec. 9 with a one-night return to—if not normalcy—at least something approaching it.
Now in its eighth year, The Game Awards returns to a live event in the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles after a one-year hiatus to a virtual event that saw a mammoth jump in viewership that nearly doubled those watching, up to about 83 million.
And while by all accounts the show was a massive success, The Game Awards founder and host Geoff Keighley is delighted to be returning to the theater and a show more anchored to reality.
The audience also reaffirmed, he said, that its biggest interest is in the games.
“You know, it's great to have celebrities, it's great to have music, but I think focusing really on games is important,” he said. “Especially this year,
there'll be a lot of content for 2022 and 2023 that will be showing us our kind of biggest lineup yet of world premieres and announcements.
“What we really learned last year was at the end of the day, it really is the games and the trailers that drive the show.”
Keighley said
he expects the show to feature 40 to 50 games this year “someway or another.” He added that the number of new games being announced is probably in the double digits.
“It's definitely a very busy year in terms of the number of games we’re being pitched. We're blessed that pretty much every developer and publisher wants to have some degree of content on the show.”
While Keighley couldn’t talk about the specifics of what was being shown—if for no other reason than a lot of things are still influx—he did say that the show is going to have some really cool next-gen stuff.
“I still feel like we've only kind of sort of touched the surface of what's possible on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, so
I think you'll see some stuff in the show that is truly pretty stunning,” he said. “We’ll see footage of games that will remind people that the best of this industry is still to come.”
“There's great tension this year. I’d say the awards are about half the show and the other half is the announcements and premieres.”