As The Game Awards celebrated its 10th-anniversary show this year, one thing is clear, the show has gotten bigger and bigger every year. The organizers of the show have announced that for the 11th year in a row, the show has broken viewership records. This time, it’s up 31% from last year with an estimated 154 million global livestreams.
To put things in perspective, The Game Awards, which officially started going by in 2014, had 1.9 million global livestreams. In 2015, it went up to 2.3 million. 2016 saw 3.8 million. 2017 saw 11.5 million. In 2018, viewership went up to 26.2 million. 2019 saw that doubled to 45.2 million. During the pandemic, viewership peaked to 83 million. In 2021, there was a minimal increase in viewership with 85 million. 2022 saw the numbers double again with 103 million. Last year saw 118 million global livestreams.
The Game Awards delivers its livestreams across a number of different digital networks, including YouTube, Twitch, Steam, TikTok Live, X (Twitter), Instagram Live, and Facebook. SteamCharts reports that Twitch, YouTube and other Western platforms had more than 4 million peak concurrent viewers combined which is up over 10% from last year.
The Game Awards also distributes its live stream globally across China on a record-setting number of networks. This year saw its biggest ever results on its record number of platforms including Bilibili, Huya, Weibo, WeChat, DouYu, Baidu, NetEase CC, Tencent Video, QQ, Kuishou, HeyBox; in South Korea or CHZZK and Soop, and NicoNico in Japan.
The 4K Game Awards feed on YouTube saw a 35% increase YoY peak concurrently to 1.3M. There was over 2.17 million peak concurrent viewers watching the show platform wide, including co-streams which is up 28%. A new record was also set in channels co-streaming the event with over 4,5000.
More than 11,000 channels co-streamed the show on Twitch which combined with YouTube’s numbers led to 15,900 co-stream channels watching The Game Awards.
Usage of #TheGameAwards on X (Twitter) was up 150% YoY, with over 1.59M posts about TGA from users, resulting in 6.79 billion impressions on X.
Viewer voting increased 25% from last year to more than 112 million across all participating platforms, including The Players’ Voice award.