Summer Game Fest Hit 62 Million Streams. Here Is How E3's Replacement Pays

When E3 2020 was cancelled, the games industry lost its June stage overnight. Geoff Keighley, the producer of The Game Awards, had already pulled out of E3, and that spring he launched something new: Summer Game Fest.

Six years later, it is the event everyone else plans around. The 2026 show drew 62 million livestreams, up 23% from 2025, and peaked at about 3.8 million concurrent viewers, a record for the series according to the analytics firm Streams Charts. More than 6,200 channels and streamers rebroadcast it, up from about 1,300 a year earlier.

The surprise is how little Summer Game Fest resembles the show it replaced.

Not a trade show

E3 was a convention: thousands of booths, retailers, journalists and a week of meetings. Summer Game Fest is mainly a broadcast, a long run of world-premiere trailers and announcements streamed live from a theatre stage. In 2025 it was held at the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on June 6. Keighley produces it with the creative agency iam8bit, and The Game Awards' own YouTube channel carries the main feed.

Around the broadcast sits a smaller, more private layer: Play Days, an invite-only hands-on event where press and creators try games. It has some of the functions of an E3 show floor, but without the public crowds or the booth arms race.

How the money works

The core product is the same as at The Game Awards: a paid trailer slot in front of a huge, engaged audience. Neither show publishes a price list, but reports have given a sense of scale. In 2024, according to a report cited by Game Developer, a one-minute trailer at Summer Game Fest cost about $250,000, 90 seconds about $350,000 and two and a half minutes about $550,000. Some slots are free, given to games or announcements the producers want to feature.

For a publisher, the maths is about attention. A trailer that lands well becomes the clip people share for days, and the cost is spread across every viewer who watches live or later. For the show, a run of paid slots, sponsorships and the free halo of big announcements cover the production.

The model has one weakness: viewers can tell when a segment is an advert. The same criticism dogs The Game Awards, and both shows rely on a mix of genuine surprises and paid placements to keep audiences coming back. We break down The Game Awards side in our TGA economics story.

The audience is global

The growth in 2026 came from everywhere. YouTube peaked at about 2.04 million concurrent viewers, up 30%, and Twitch at about 1.7 million. In China, Bilibili peaked at about 2.8 million, nearly double its previous record for the show. Counting co-streamers, one tally put the total at 12,875 creators, 7,912 on Twitch and 4,963 on YouTube.

That reach matters to Asian publishers in particular. A Korean or Chinese game shown at Summer Game Fest is seen by Western players and by its home audience at the same moment, through the same feed.

Why it matters

Summer Game Fest proves something E3 never quite managed: you do not need a convention centre to be the centre of the games calendar. A stage, a stream and a reason for publishers to show up are enough, as long as the trailers are good.

WGC's take: the risk for the industry is concentration. One producer now runs the most important showcase in June (Summer Game Fest), the most important in August (gamescom's Opening Night Live) and the most important in December (The Game Awards). That is a lot of influence over which games get seen. For now, the audiences keep growing, and publishers keep paying. Read how its predecessor fell in our history of E3.