Since 2014, The Game Awards has annually recognized video games that stand out for their excellence, many of which will likely be considered hallmarks of the industry for decades to come. The show is hosted by Geoff Keighley, a video games journalist who previously presented the Spike Video Game Awards and hoped to refocus attention on video game achievements with TGA.
Each year, an advisory board – made up of game publishers and developers, as well as representatives of hardware manufacturers like AMD, Nintendo, and Microsoft – selects over 95 global news outlets and influencers to nominate and vote on video games in a number of categories including story, art, music, audio, and voice acting. In 2017, public voting was added, accounting for 10 percent of the final decision and allowing fans to select their favorite games via social media.
The Game Awards have proven so successful that even mainstream media has begun to pay attention to the show’s growth. Hollywood Reporter called it the Super Bowl of the gaming industry and the Washington Post has dubbed it the Oscars for gaming. Indeed, in recent years, average viewership for The Game Awards has surpassed that of the Oscars by nearly triple.
When it debuted in 2014, The Game Awards attracted 1.9 million viewers; audience size the following two years increased marginally. Since 2017, perhaps due to the addition of fan voting, average viewership of the awards show has doubled every year, reaching an impressive 83 million in 2020. For comparison, the Oscars attracted about 24 million viewers in 2020, and numbers for the 93rd Academy Awards, which aired on Sunday, April 25, 2021, dropped to 10 million.
Part of the explanation given for the decrease in viewership of the Oscars is that ratings for awards shows like the Emmys, Grammys, and Golden Globes have all dropped during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the films that would draw the most attention were postponed, or skipped theaters and released directly to streaming services that not everybody subscribes to.
The popularity of video games, on the other hand, saw a marked jump during lockdown, when people stuck in their homes turned to gaming as a way to not only distract themselves but interact with friends, family, and players from around the world via online gaming services like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.
Numerous game companies, including giants like EA and Microsoft, experienced strong sales growth in 2020. Last year also marked the launch of the long-awaited next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X. Though many people still haven’t been able to get their hands on one, sales of the new hardware have broken records, with the PS5 currently the fastest-selling console in history.
Source: The Game Awards, CNN