Gamescom Opening Night Live stream — see the big PS5 and Xbox Series X reveals here

(Image credit: The Game Awards)

Gamescom is officially kicking off with an Opening Night Live 2020 stream. The event will feature a variety of high-profile announcements, covering games from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, to Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, to Doom Eternal. If you’d like to watch the opening keynote, hosted by Geoff Keighley, all you need to do is tune in on YouTube or Twitch.

Opening Night Live 2020 stream

Gamescom Opening Night Live 2020 starts at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CEST on YouTube and Twitch.

Tuning into the Gamescom: Opening Night Live stream is extremely simple. The keynote will kick off at 8 PM CEST, which translates to 2 PM ET or 11 AM PT. 

We’ve embedded a link below, so you can watch right on this page. If you’re on mobile and would prefer to watch in a YouTube app, you can find the video right here. You can also tune in on Twitch, Twitter or Facebook.

  • PS5 release date, price, specs, controller and pre-orders
  • Everything we know about Xbox Series X 

The keynote will take two hours and — oddly — stream from Los Angeles, not Cologne, Germany. There will also be a 30-minute pre-show. As such, if you want to see absolutely everything the keynote has to offer, you’ll have to tune in at 1:30 PM ET and tune out at 4 PM ET.

Gamescom: Opening Night Live games

While we don’t know everything that developers will show off during the Gamescom keynote, we do know some of the games that will highlight the event. The biggest reveal (that we know about so far, at least) is a full gameplay demo of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart for the PS5. Otherwise, Gamescom has promised “exclusive content debuts from Call of Duty: Black Ops — Cold War, Fall Guys: Season 2, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands [and] Doom Eternal.”

Those games alone won’t eat up two hours, however, and Gamescom has a whole slew of other publishers on the docket for the keynote. These companies include 2K, Activision, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Blizzard, Bungie, Deep Silver, Devolver, Electronic Arts, Frontier, Focus Home, Gearbox, Headup, Sony, Square Enix, Warner Bros. and Xbox Game Studios.

You can watch a brief promo here:

While it would take too long to enumerate every major franchise from those publishers, it should suffice to say that we’ll see a lot of new PS5, Xbox Series X and PC games from both first- and third-party studios.

Prospective viewers should be aware that even though the livestream celebrates a German event, the audio will be in English. There will be subtitles available in a variety of languages, though, so European gamers who had planned to attend Gamescom in real life should have no trouble following along with the digitized event.

After the keynote, Gamescom will continue online until August 30, and you can follow all the news at Gamescom’s official website. Tom’s Guide will be covering the biggest stories out of the event, so be sure to check back for more throughout the week.

Marshall Honorof

Marshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site's coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing background, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology. After hours, you can find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi.