The 2019 Game Awards have announced that last week’s awards stream broke their record-setting performance from last year with an increase of 73% in viewership. Last year’s had 26.2 million livestreams watching the show while this year there were 45.2 million global livestreams. There was also an increase across all facets of The Game Awards, including viewer voting, social engagement, and co-streaming. The Game Awards had a peak concurrency of over 7.5 million global viewers with 2 million concurrent viewers across Twitch and YouTube. The top 13 platforms that aired the show saw double-digit increases in viewership.
Creator/Producer of The Game Awards Geoff Keighley said: “These record-setting results show that gaming culture continues to reach new audiences around the globe, and these numbers re-affirm our distribution approach of streaming the show live and free across more than 50 digital platforms.”
The Game Awards was trending #1 worldwide on Twitter for the whole show. 18 of the top 30 trends worldwide were from the show. Over 1 million tweets were shared about the show during the live broadcast and there was an increase of 65% in viewership with over 4 million unique viewers on Twitter.
4,700 individual creators from Twitch co-streamed The Game Awards live, up from 3,300 creators in 2018. On Twitch, there were 1.3 million concurrent viewers at its peak, up from 1.1 million last year. Fan voting increased by 50% to more than 15.5 million logged-in votes.
Like it is every year since its creation, a lot of new information was revealed during The Game Awards in 2019. One of the biggest was the reveal of what the next-generation Xbox is going to look like in addition to Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II running in-engine. We also saw the first game announced for the PlayStation 5 in Godfall. There were also trailers for Final Fantasy VII Remake, No More Heroes III, Humankind, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Gears Tactics, The Wolf Among Us 2, and Ghost of Tsushima which was teased at PlayStation’s last State of Play of the year leading up to The Game Awards.
New games revealed at The Game Awards include Bravely Default II, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, Magic Legends, The Untitled Beaker Game, Weird West, New World, CONV/RGENCE: A League of Legends Story, Naraka: Bladepoint, and Fast & Furious: Crossroads.
The Game Awards also did something new this year with The Game Festival which is a new digital consumer event that featured over a dozen game demos that was available to play on Steam for a limited time.
There were also performances from Chvrches who played music from Death Stranding, Grimes who performed the new song 4ÆM which will part of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack, and Green Day with a special performance.
You can find a breakdown of The Game Awards results and winners here and you can see what MXDWN’s top 10 biggest things revealed during the show here.