In the years since the slow death of E3, Summer Games Fest has become the new banner under which every year, in early June, the video game industry comes together to promote all of the biggest projects they’ve got releasing in the next six to twelve months. A collective of livestreamed events both big and small, bundled together by general proximity and shared gamer attention, it’s still the industry’s biggest week of sustained focus on what is coming down the line.
One of the highlights of Summer Games Fest 2023 for me came from Ubisoft. They revealed a new side-scrolling Prince of Persia title, The Lost Crown, which would be released just seven months later in January 2024. It wasn’t the game announcement itself that felt important to me, it was the fact that it came bundled the same day with an announcement of accessibility features planned for the game’s pending release.
The game was still seven months away from its release date, but the same day it was announced, disabled gamers got to learn what accessibility features it would support, ranging from High Contrast Mode visuals to an innovative system for pinning screenshots to your in-game map. Disabled players got to find out, the same day as the game was revealed, whether it was likely to be playable for them or not on launch day.
That was, and still is, a rarity. It was a big deal.
Compared to just a few years ago, we are in a much better position today when it comes to game developers announcing accessibility plans for their game in advance of those games releasing. Prior to the summer of 2020 it was pretty much unheard of for a major game company to discuss their accessibility plans ahead of a game’s release date, but The Last of Us: Part 2 undeniably popularised the idea that best practice was to talk about your accessibility plans at least a few weeks ahead of your release if at all possible. It’s certainly not an industry standard yet, but increasingly things are changing such that when a major AAA game hasn’t spoken about accessibility prior to launch day, it is seen as a disappointment rather than the expected norm.
Now, it might be naive of me, but I had quietly had hoped that the positive praise that Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown received last year would be a catalyst for change being seen in 2024. It was a game that demonstrated that it was possible to talk about accessibility early on in development, while all eyes are on your biggest set of announcements for the year during Summer Games Fest, and get positive attention for that.
While I knew the industry wasn’t going to rewrite its marketing playbook overnight, I had hoped that Summer Games Fest 2024 would feature an increased number of examples of accessibility being acknowledged during the week of livestreams and accompanying press releases. If nothing else, I hoped that it was going to mark the start of a trend for Ubisoft, and that they might repeat the tactic for a couple of their games at this year’s livestream.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn’t discuss any of their games accessibility offerings during Summer Games Fest 2024. Neither did any of the other major games companies.
It seems The Lost Crown’s approach from 2023 didn’t really catch on.
Right now, video game accessibility is being treated by major game companies as part of a marketing roadmap. I understand why it is, I’ve spoken to enough people at enough publishers to get a sense of what’s up. There is an understanding that disabled gamers want to know if games are going to be playable for them as early as possible, but there’s also a desire for as many marketing beats as possible to happen at strategic moments that drive pre-orders and purchases, and often higher ups decide the latter is more important.
Accessibility information is a more valuable marketing point if it’s more proximate to your ability to preorder a game at the right time to drive hype and to drive positive discussion at a pivotal moment.
Now, there are exceptions to this accessibility feature marketing strategy of course, one of which I think is particularly notable in discussions of why Summer Games Fest lacks accessibility discussions.
May 16th 2024 was Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day that has somewhat become a focal point for accessibility in gaming announcements and discussions. Taking place just a few weeks before Summer Games Fest, this is the main date in the summer that game developers tend to focus any accessibility focused game announcements they have around. From Xbox this year increasing the scope of their controller licensing program, to a new accessibility information database being created, the day has become a focal point for companies wanting to announce accessibility at a time that they know it will get guaranteed increased attention.
And here’s the thing, I don’t want to diminish the impact that Global Accessibility Awareness Day has, but it isn’t a replacement for accessibility discussions during Summer Games Fest. It’s a day that’s primarily noticed by people already in the accessibility space rather than one that’s reaching a wider audience who might not realise support for their needs is out there, and it’s a few weeks prior to most of the upcoming year’s major video games getting revealed.
Its placement in the calendar makes it impossible for developers to talk about accessibility for games that they’re less than a month away from unveiling, and as such there will always be announcements about accessibility that simply cannot be made on this accessibility focused day.
It is important for me to acknowledge that I’m not a neutral observer in this debate. I run the Access-Ability Summer Showcase, an event during Summer Games Fest week aimed at highlighting accessibility settings and design approaches in upcoming video games. I’m someone who believes that discussing these elements of games well in advance of launch is the direction the industry should move toward.
But here’s the thing, in a perfect world, I wouldn’t need to put together a dedicated accessibility in games showcase during Summer Games Fest week. I would love it if my own event started to feel unnecessary and irrelevant in the years to come. If that were to happen, it would mean that the industry was learning the right lessons.
I get that not every game in every gaming showcase during Summer Games Fest is going to talk about accessibility. Some developers won’t have considered it for their games, and others will make the judgement call that they’re better off focusing on other things if they’ve only got a limited amount of time to try and show off their game to a captive audience in someone else’s showcase. I know not every game developer has the luxury of taking time during their trailers to have these discussions, but some certainly do, particularly when the games are being published by the same companies running the showcases.
The Xbox Summer Showcase 2024 ended with a lengthy video presentation about the new upcoming Call of Duty game. The presentation lasted around half an hour, and was perhaps the closest we got to acknowledgement of accessibility during the whole week of livestreams.
While the word accessibility was never directly said, we did get around 40 seconds of presentation explaining that the newest entry in the series has an option for simplified contextual traversal controls, demonstrated by showing the player climbing over small obstacles without having to press any buttons to activate those small up and down climbing animations.
It was a positive new feature addition to see acknowledged, but it highlighted the point that I’m trying to make. In a 30 minute presentation, that was the closest we got to discussion of accessibility. No mentions were made of the fact that the series now supports High Contrast Mode visuals in single player campaigns, or any of the single player aim assist features the series now offers, or anything else new that might be in the works for this upcoming entry.
While I will give some leeway to indie developers not taking time out of their 30 second Wholesome Games Showcase trailer slot to discuss accessibility, if PlayStation, or Xbox, or Ubisoft, or even Nintendo wanted to, they could allow themselves an additional 30, maybe 40 seconds to talk about a game’s accessibility plans during their own showcase without really having any issues. They’re the ones running the showcase, they can go a little long if they want to. There’s nobody mandating how long their own showcase is allowed to be.
They could even just show a few seconds of screenshots of settings menus for people to pause and look through in their own time. It’s really not something that they would struggle to be able to incorporate without changing that pace of their presentation too much.
Last year’s Prince of Persia accessibility announcement is the kind of thing I’d love to see more of during Summer Games Fest. Even if the news doesn’t come during the livestream itself, instead as part of a press release after the fact later in that day, making sure that accessibility discussions happen early enough that players can get excited for new games as close as possible to their initial announcement should be the direction the industry moves in.
It was disappointing, but not surprising, that we didn’t see more discussions of accessibility during Summer Games Fest 2024. Here’s hoping that by 2025, some progress will be made on that front.