E3 may be canceled this year, but the big game companies will continue anyway, either as part of Summer Games Fest or with their own presentations and live streams. Arguably the top dog these days is Sony, which will host what it claims to be a meaty “PlayStation Showcase” on May 24.
The show is over an hour long, which makes it quite a bit longer than the usual PlayStation State of Play live streams, which are usually around 30 minutes long. While Sony has largely moved beyond the industry’s old marketing cadence to focus heavily on E3 each June, this seems as close to an E3 press as Sony will be offering this year.
Sony is promising “a wealth of new games” for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR2 from a wide variety of development studios. “Expect a glimpse at several new creations from PlayStation Studios, as well as enchanting games from our third-party partners and indie creators,” says a blog post announcing the event.
Of course, the announcement didn’t say which games to expect, but we have some educated guesses based on the expected release windows of previously announced titles. You can almost certainly expect Insomniac Games’ spider man 2, which is slated to be the platform’s big fall or holiday exclusive. Likewise, Insomniac is working on Wolverine for a later date, and we’ve seen almost nothing of the game so far – now could be the perfect time to show it off.
It’s also just a few weeks before the expected ship date of the (probably timed) PS5 exclusive Final Fantasy XVIso another glimpse of that is possible – although we’ve already seen a lot of it. Dead stranding 2 is also a possibility, and Sucker Punch is known to be working on one Ghost of Tsushima sequel – although it may be too early to show the gameplay of either one.
Based on the timing, we wouldn’t be surprised if there are teasers for it Diablo IV and the PS5 version of Honkai: Starrail, or. PSVR2 remasters of recent VR classics also seem likely (Defeat Sabereveryone?).
As mentioned above, the blog post also promises new IPs, so we’re curious to see what some PlayStation studios will reveal with no announced titles, such as Bend Studio, Bluepoint Games or Housemarque.
The stream will begin airing May 24 at 4 p.m. ET. Sony has streamed on both YouTube and Twitch in previous events of this format.