The Game Awards this Thursday was an enormous coming-out party for many games, both AAA and independently developed, but for some it was an even bigger showing than others. Benji-Sales, a popular Twitter analyst of video games has been feverishly compiling figures based upon the watch counts of a variety of trailers – all for games that were shown or debuted at The Game Awards. Based on the data that Benji-Sales has presented, some games are looking like they’ll be adopted by an extremely large number of players when they eventually launch, while some others may not be getting quite the level of consumer traction that their developers and/or publishers had hoped.
Firstly, the method behind the madness. Benji-Sales outlined the criteria that underpinned his work, saying “Methodology – Compiled all Trailer Uploads (No Reaction Videos or Breakdown Videos) of 30k Views or More.” Sorry smaller-scale YouTubers and influencers, you’re (in the nicest way possible) statistically irrelevant.
Next the results, and there’s perhaps no surprise that big licenses and big sequels fill the list with some nice highlights along the way. The data shared by Benji-Sales reveals the top eight viewed games following The Game Awards based upon the above criteria,
“The Most Popular Trailers from The Game Awards on YouTube
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – 4.9m+
• Hades II – 2.4m+
• Armored Core VI – 2.2m+
• Suicide Squad – 2.1m+
• Death Stranding 2 – 1.9m+
• Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – 1.6m+
• Diablo IV – 1.5m+
• Tekken 8 – 1.4m+”
As is indicated in the data, two big licenses do a lot of the lifting here, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor from EA and LucasArts more than doubled the next best performer, with the Star Wars license continuing to operate on a level that other franchises simply cannot. Suicide Squad from Rocksteady and Warner Bros also attracted a large crowd again proving the power of DC licenses, especially Batman. There are a string of games that you would expect to do well, doing just that like Tekken 8, Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077‘s Phantom Liberty Expansion (some nice reward for effort for CD Projekt Red for fixing the core game), and Death Stranding 2 among them, while there are a selection of other games that really exceeded expectations for a variety of different reasons, Hades II as the successor to one of the most acclaimed indie titles of all time, and Armored Core VI riding the wave of FromSoftware success that culminated with Elden Ring winning Game Of The Year at the same event that same night. On the less positive side, hotly anticipated games such as Final Fantasy XVI did not feature in the top eight, the same with the new IP coming from Bioshock creator Ken Levine, Judas.
