The Game Awards was big this year. Really big, like the biggest it has ever been. Let’s run the numbers for a moment; it was announced recently that there were 26.2 million viewers during the livestream this year, while there were 11.5 million viewers last year. That means that there was a 128% increase between last year and this year, which is a little more than double the amount of viewers. When comparing the 1.9 million viewers of the 2014 Game Awards, that’s a 1279% increase in viewership from the first time the awards ceremony was held to this year.
There are a few reasons for this increase in viewers from last year to this year, one of these reasons is that there has been a regular increase in viewers on Twitch and YouTube. In Twitch alone, there were well over 1 million viewers during the peak of the stream. This was well over double from 2017, making The Game Awards 2018 stream one of the largest streams ever on the site. In YouTube there were over 4 million simultaneous viewers worldwide, also doubling the number of viewers compared to 2017. The Game Awards was also the top trend on Twitter for the fourth year in a row, with its respective hashtag being used 1.6 times more than last year. The main reason for the increased viewership may very well be a general increase of distribution in China, with the show available on numerous networks in the country.
The Game Awards has been produced and hosted by its creator Geoff Keighley since the start, who also worked on the Spike Video Game Awards until it ended. As the ceremony is one half awards show and one half “a first look at the future of the video game industry”, it always has the giants of the game industry attending with this year being no exception to this. Only time will tell if The Game Awards next year will have the same growth as the past shows.
If you didn’t catch The Game Awards this year, you can watch the full stream here.