The Game Awards viewership has doubled compared to 2017’s numbers. This makes 2018’s presentation of Geoff Keighley’s video game awards show the most successful yet, racking up more than 26.2 million stream views.
Plenty of people tuned in to this year’s The Game Awards across multiple platforms. The Game Awards viewership for 2018’s show was up 127% from last year’s show which hit a then record-breaking 11.5 million views. This year’s show had a bunch of fantastic announcements like the news that a brand-new Mortal Kombat game is on the way and an exciting character reveal for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: Joker from Persona 5.
The Game Awards viewership was plenty strong on live streaming platform Twitch. It reached an astonishing 1.13 million peak concurrent viewers in the midst of the show. Much like the overall viewership, this number was also twice that of the previous year’s showing. The Game Awards ended up being one of the biggest live streams so far on Twitch. Ultimately, it totaled more than 4 million concurrent viewers worldwide across all of the live streaming platforms that it was broadcast on.
“These results further validate our focus on an all-digital, no-friction approach of sharing this show globally across more than 45 video platforms, not to mention the growing interest and passion for video games around the world,” said the show’s creator and host Geoff Keighley to GamesIndustry.biz.
This year’s show saw quite a few surprises. A lot of excellent games were nominated for the various categories and we got to see more than few of these titles clean up nicely. God of War ended up taking home Best Action-Adventure Game, Best Game Direction, and the coveted Game of the Year award. Celeste cleaned up nicely on the indie front, taking home the Best Indie Game and Games For Impact awards. Meanwhile, Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t do as well as expected, only bringing home awards in the Best Narrative, Best Score/Music, and Best Audio Design categories.
The Game Awards viewership proves that Geoff Keighley has managed to put together one hell of a show. Viewership is up well over 1,000% since the very first show in 2014 and it looks like it’s going to keep going higher.
Header image credit: The Game Awards
