The calendar is starting to fill up. Geoff Keighley confirmed last week that Summer Game Fest will return to the Dolby Theatre on June 5 to 8. There are rumours, carried by multiple insiders, of a PlayStation State of Play happening before the end of May, leaning toward first-party. Xbox has run its own showcase in roughly the same window every year. Nintendo will say something. Other publishers and platforms will fill in around the edges. The next four to six weeks are going to dump more trailers, dates, and shadow-drops onto your timeline than you can reasonably absorb in a season.
I am, on balance, glad about all of it. The summer showcase rhythm is one of the small good things about being a person who pays attention to games in the 2020s. It is also, every year without exception, a small trap, and I want to talk for a few paragraphs about how I'm trying to walk through it this time.
What the showcase is actually for
It helps to be honest about what these events are doing. They are, mostly, marketing windows that publishers and platforms choreograph to land on a beat the press will cover, the streamers will react to, and the wishlist counts will spike against. That is not a complaint. Marketing is the work of telling people about things they would otherwise miss, and there are a lot of small games that genuinely benefit from a sizzle reel because they wouldn't get a moment on the front page of any storefront without it.
But the structure is meant to do a specific thing to you. It is meant to compress decision-making. You see a trailer that's been edited for ninety seconds of maximum vibe, a date pops up at the end, and the small Wishlist button in the corner is doing 80% of the actual work the publisher needs done. The whole machine, including the chat reactions and the immediate "first impressions" videos that go up an hour later, is built to convert a feeling into an action while the feeling is hot.
That is fine. It is also, if you let it run unchecked, the way a wishlist of 240 games happens to a person, where 15 of them are real candidates and 225 are tape that decayed.
What the trailer is good at
Trailers are very good at telling you a game exists, which voices are involved, and what the broad shape of it looks like. They are not bad at telling you when it ships. They are reliably bad at telling you what playing it for forty hours will actually feel like.
This is not a moral failing of trailers. It is a structural property. A trailer is two minutes long and a game is forty hours long. The marketing is necessarily a sample, and the sample has to look like the most exciting two minutes the team can defensibly cut. Which means the trailer is almost guaranteed to be more vivid than the actual median minute of the game. By the time you sit down with the build in November, the same combat encounter that opened the trailer is your fifty-third combat encounter, and the music isn't swelling.
This is the part of the showcase season that the journal half of my brain wants to flag. The trailers are designed to imprint a promise on you, and the promise is what gets logged in your wishlist, but the promise is not what you'll review six months later. A useful exercise, around mid-July, is to scroll back through whatever you wishlisted in June and ask, sentence by sentence, what specifically excited you. About half the entries will not survive the question.
A small viewing plan
The version of showcase season that wears me out is the one where I watch every two-hour stream live, every reaction video the next morning, every "everything you missed" recap from a third creator, and emerge on the Sunday night exhausted, with no clear sense of which two or three games I actually want to make space for. The version that works for me has gotten quieter over the years.
I watch the main showcases live with a friend or two if I can, because they are genuinely fun as social events when you keep the chat in another room and let the trailers play. I let the rest of the calendar wait until the next morning, when the recaps are already up and I can skim a list of titles instead of sitting through a sponsor segment.
At the end of each day of the festival, before bed, I write down three games. Not eight. Three. Three is the number I can actually hold in my head over the next month while I wait for more details. The other forty things from the day are not lost; they will get re-covered, the press will write about them, the Discord will surface them again, and if any of them survive the next thirty days in my actual attention they earn their way back. The discipline is just write down three, sleep on it.
When the second showcase happens, I do the same exercise, and then I check the previous day's three. If the previous day's three still feel like real candidates a week later, they go to the active wishlist. If not, off the list. The wishlist is supposed to be a small handful of real intentions, not a museum of forgotten promises.
The journal of the year you're actually in
The other small thing I do, which I'd recommend to anyone who has felt fried by past summers, is to keep a separate note for the games I'm actually playing during the showcase weeks. Not the ones I wishlisted, the ones I'm playing. June and early July are good months for this, because the new releases are sparse enough that most of what I'm actually putting hours into is something I started in April or earlier.
The reason this matters is that there is a strange psychological effect during showcase season where the games you are watching trailers for start to feel more present in your life than the game you actually opened last night. The trailer is shiny, recent, talked-about. The game on your couch is slow, real, and has actual hours in it. By the end of June, if you don't write any of it down, your sense of "what 2026 in games has been for me" will be weighted toward things you watched a sizzle reel of and away from the things you spent twenty hours with on a Sunday afternoon.
This is, transparently, why we built Perthro the way we did. The journal entries are written in your voice and can be a sentence or three pages, and the playing status keeps the games you actually have hours in distinct from the wishlist of the games you're hyped for. Six months from now you'll go back and read what you wrote and remember the actual texture of the game you were playing in the week the trailer for someone else's game blew up your timeline, and the trailer will fade and the actual hours will hold. The TestFlight is open if you want to come along; iOS 16 and up, free during the beta, with the invite at testflight.apple.com/join/XVxCdRcK.
But you don't need an app for any of this. A note on your phone, a page in a paper notebook, an email draft to yourself that you never send. The point is to leave evidence. Trailer season is going to do its thing. The wishlist is going to balloon. The promises are going to be made. A small habit of writing down what you're actually playing, alongside what you're hyped about, is the closest thing I've found to staying honest with yourself across a season designed to compress your decision-making into a Tuesday night livestream.
See you on the other side of June. Mark down the three games you're actually waiting for, and then go play whatever's open on your couch.