According to Geoff Keighley, last week’s Game Awards reached 103 million livestreams, marking the highest viewership in the award show’s 9-year history. By his own metrics, that’s up by 20 percent over the 85 million of 2021’s Game Awards.
Keighley revealed additional metrics, such as 11.5 million video views on Twitter, and increase in hashtag usage (by 31 percent), conversation volume (28 percent), and unique authors (33 percent), all compared to 2021. Further, the show trended at #1 worldwide and featured in all top 5 worldwide trends.
With these significant yearly increases in views, it’s safe to say Keighley’s annual highlight reel of big-budget and beloved indie games will continue to close out each year.
To further underline how far the Game Awards have come since its 2014 debut, Keighley posted the viewership stats of every thus far, showing how viewership really spiked up towards the end of the 2010s and going into 2020.
On Steam, unique viewership was at 9.5 million, and its peak high of concurrent users was at 850,000 watchers.
One of the more notable events during the awards ceremony was a Steam Deck giveaway where one of Valve’s handhelds was given out every minute. Per Keighley, the giveaway was a “big hit,” though he stopped short of providing an actual number of human beings who managed to get a Steam Deck.
In terms of actual wins at 2022’s Game Awards, a lot of the big name awards went to FromSoftware’s Elden Ring and Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok. The latter game’s wins included Best Performance for Christopher Judge as Kratos, Best Score for Bear McCreary, and Best Innovation and Accessibility.
Elden Ring, meanwhile, took Game of the Year, Best Art Direction, and Best Game Direction.