Here's when Summer Game Fest 2021 kicks off

Last year, Geoff Keighley kicked off Summer Game Fest, a months-long digital game festival that wound up filling the void left behind by E3 2020 after it was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Summer Game Fest organizers confirmed that the event will be returning once again this year, but details at the time of that announcement were few and far between. Today, we're learning new things about Summer Game Fest 2021, including when it will be kicking off.

We already knew that Summer Game Fest 2021 would get underway in June, but now its organizers have confirmed that it will be starting on June 10th with a show called Kick Off Live!. The show will be hosted by Keighley himself and promises "more than a dozen world premieres and announcements from select publishers." Kick Off Live! will also "serve as a preview" for the various publisher livestream events that will happen over the course of the entire festival.

It seems that Weezer will also be in attendance during the show, and they'll be debuting a "brand new, stream safe game soundtrack song that can be freely streamed on Twitch, YouTube, and anywhere else without being blocked or losing monetization." Given Twitch's recent issues with copyright law, that could be good news indeed for a number of streamers – assuming, of course, that those streamers who are looking for music to play on stream actually like Weezer in the first place.

Finally, Kick Off Live! will include an indie game showcase produced by iam8bit and Double Fine called Day of the Devs. In today's announcement, we're told that Summer Game Fest will include updates on upcoming games from a large number of major publishers. PlayStation, Xbox, Square Enix, Activison, Blizzard, Capcom, Electronic Arts, Amazon Games, Sega, and Ubisoft are some of the biggest names on the list, and more will be revealed later.

So, there you have it: Summer Game Fest kicks off in just a few weeks and it looks like it's going to be a rather big event. We don't know what, specifically, the schedule for Summer Game Fest is beyond Kick Off Live!, but the event's organizers do say that publishers will be updating fans directly through free live streams. We'll keep an eye out for a more detailed schedule, so stay tuned for that.