The Game Awards, in August, is in a bit of conceptual phase; the team's coming up with big, high-concept ideas without knowing what's possible yet. It's a time to shoot for the stars, Keighley says, to just imagine things. Inevitably, all their pie in the sky ideas won't make it into the show, but now's not the time to worry about that. This is, as Keighley puts it, the creative phase of the show.
"And that's really sort of part of the fun of just kind of kicking things off early," he says.
That's not to say, though, that the show starts from scratch every year. As Keighley tells it, The Game Awards is an iterative process. If something doesn't work or doesn't make it into a previous show for one reason or another, the idea isn't immediately thrown out. If anything, it becomes a bullet point for the next year.
