Only one day separates Geoff Keighley’s reinvention of his often ridiculed award show and Sony’s PlayStation Experience which promises to bring the E3-like experience to fans in Las Vegas. Each event (although the PSX runs for 2 days) is promising a celebration of gaming with special announcements and surprising reveals but what does that mean for Sony?
Despite last year’s well-advised absence from Sony at the VGX, Sony has always played a major role in the VGAs. Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception was revealed at VGAS 2010. The critically acclaimed The Last of Us was also revealed at the VGAs back in 2011. Although not necessarily an award show, Naughty Dog did use Geoff Keighley’s PS4 Launch countdown show to debut and reveal the next Uncharted for PS4. Sony and particularly Naughty Dog seem to enjoy working with Keighley and making surprising announcements.
It is why the odd scheduling of these two events make me question if Sony has something planned for The Game Awards as well as for the party they’re throwing themselves. Lets break down what we know so far about the PlayStation Experience.
PlayStation Experience
The Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas Dec. 6 &7
- Project Morpheus will be available for the public
- A variety of developer panels including a God of War retrospective as well as the process of modeling a next-gen Nathan Drake
- Impressive roster of publishers and developers to be present such as From Software, Capcom, Square Enix, Media Molecule and Guerilla Games
- Unreleased games will be available for demoing such as Until Dawn, The Order: 1886, Bloodborne, No Man’s Sky, Batman: Arkham Knight and many more.
With over 40,000 square feet of PlayStation games, panels, signings and giveaways, it’s like Sony’s own personal E3. Rumblings of a new game announcement have been making the rounds and as recently as last week, another insider claims that a PS4 Exclusive JRPG is set to debut at the event. Take all of this with a grain of salt but it would be rather uncharacteristic of Sony to be throwing such a lavish event and not announce anything special.
When you take a look at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, things are also looking interesting.
The Game Awards 2014
AXIS Theater, Las Vegas Dec. 5
- Awards will be given (duh)
- World Premiers
- Advisory Board made up of some pretty big players in Activision, Rockstar, Warner Bros Interactive, Nintendo, Valve, Kojima Productions, Ubisoft, PlayStation and Xbox.
And that’s about all we know about the Game Awards. Even though many of us hoped for a bigger reveal from Nintendo at last year’s VGX (unless you really dug cranky kong) you can never truly count Geoff Keighly out. He knows how to work and secure deals when it comes to bombastic world premiers. At the VGX we learned of Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones from TellTale Games. We also saw our first look at No Man’s Sky.
Will Sony give Geoff Keighley an exclusive to reveal on his show or are they keeping all the surprises for the fans at PlayStation Experience? Is it a conflict of interest? Does Naughty Dog want to make another big splash on the Geoff Keighley show like they have in the past?
Only time will tell but you can be sure that The Game Fanatics will be on it the second it breaks. Tickets are still on sale but if you can’t make it, you can catch the live streams down below for both events. Lets hope we get at least one megaton from Sony as Microsoft continues to keep the heat on with tremendous discounts.
