Geoff Keighley is creator and host of The Game Awards.

Geoff Keighley’s The Game Festival will let gamers play 12 new game demos for 48 hours

The Game Awards founder Geoff Keighley announced The Game Festival, a new online consumer event where gamers will be able to play a dozen new game demos on Steam for 48 hours. After that, the games will disappear until they’re ready.

With this concept, Keighley addresses one of the problems for trigger-happy viewers. The Game Awards can get 30 million people excited about an announcement for a new game. But usually, those fans won’t be able to play these new games for a while.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.