The Game Awards Cracks Over 150 Million Viewers

It’s been a week since The Game Awards 2024, and many people are still talking about it for both positive and negative reasons. Overall, the sentiment is that the show was the best of recent years and possibly the best of the lot when you consider how things started and where it is now. Regardless of certain feelings or fan polls, the viewership numbers were always going to be the thing that many people talked about. That includes show creator and host Geoff Keighley, who couldn’t wait to post that the show had crossed 154 million views worldwide. That’s a new record for the show.

As you’ll see in the chart below, it’s not simply that the show reached 154 million views but that it grew by almost 40 million year-to-year. That’s one of the biggest jumps in the show’s history, and it highlights just how many people worldwide were watching the live stream. We don’t know the breakdown by region, but it’s fair to think that plenty in the United States and UK were watching it, with others tuning in where they could.

Keighley also dropped some stats to further impress, including how there were 4 million concurrent viewers between Twitch and YouTube and that the Twitter usage of the show’s hashtag led to over 6 billion impressions across 1.5 million posts. Just in the “Player’s Choice” category award, there were over 112 million votes.

So, with all of these stats, that would imply that it was the “best show ever,” correct? Well, if you listen to Geoff Keighley and certain fans, they would tell you that. The poll that the show dropped got a result of “A” from fans, but it wasn’t as clear-cut as you might think. If you look at the poll, less than 200K voted in it. Just as important, if you look at the other scores, they combine to be above the “A” grade, with quite a few people thinking it was a “D or below.”

Another thing to note is that while Geoff Keighley was praising a lot of what The Game Awards did, just as many have called out what the show didn’t do. There was still a “lack of respect” toward developers, especially during the acceptance speeches, and Geoff Keighley himself barely touched upon the layoffs and other issues going on within the gaming industry, forcing others, like Larian Studios head Swen Vincke, to be the blunt hammer that laid down the law.

Yet, even with these continued controversies, this view count highlights that the show will go on.