The largest in-person video game event will be held without two of the titans of the industry
There are still two (eternal) months ahead for the Gamescom 2024, but another heavyweight in the industry already announces that it will not attend the great German video game fair: through the German media Gameswirtschaft, Sony itself confirms that PlayStation joins the list of companies absent for another consecutive year. Two months after Nintendo made the same move. And both companies have their own and very powerful launches in September.
Why not secure a place in what, after the disappearance of E3, has become the largest in-person video game event? If we base ourselves on what we experienced during the recent Summer Game Fest, we find that PlayStation and Nintendo have practically gone on their own and have been able to exhibit their announcements on their terms and without having to compete with other scheduled events. Does that mean we won’t see Astro Bot or the new Zelda at Gamescom? Not quite.
To be really fair, as far as Nintendo is concerned, it has saved its new cards for the Brazilian edition of Gamescom that will be held a month before and which it will attend together with Ubisoft or Atari. That said, the real focus when it comes to new features is on the traditional Opening Night Liveorganized by Geoff Keighley, dated August 20, 2024 and in which there is room for all kinds of new advances, surprises and reminders of what both PlayStation Studios and the Big N have on their hands.
However, we have not forgotten that the public and open part of Gamescom is one thing and, in parallel, another is held behind closed doors. In fact, at VidaExtra we shared the information offered by a Nintendo that decided to present the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever it ends up being called) to its partners and what it can offer as a system. And, in theory, rumors around the PS5 Pro are expected to take shape during those months.
And what about Xbox and the rest of the companies? In the absence of an official announcement, Microsoft’s video game division has always kept announcements, joys for Game Pass subscribers and real bombshells for the German fair, and seeing everything that is on the horizon and what was announced in the last Showcase (including the next Call of Duty) there are reasons to attend this year. What we do know is that both Capcom and THQ Nordic itself will attend the event.
Gamescom 2024 will be held in the middle of a veritable bombardment of releases: the opening ceremony will be four intense days ( from August 21 to 25) in which the second half of 2024 will be defined and will begin to draw an increasingly promising 2025. Between those days, in fact, titles such as Black Myth: Wukong or a Concord from PlayStation Studios will be released; and not long after highly anticipated games such as Star Wars Outlaws, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the return of AstroBot or the epic Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. All of them good reasons to keep an eye on what is happening in the city of Cologne.
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