The Game Awards 2015 Were Viewed By A Lot Of People

Millions of people spent their last Thursday watching The Game Awards.

Marketing and gaming public relations guru Geoff Keighley spent a lot of time and effort into crafting a games marketing event masquerading as a Game Awards program. In this, the second year of Keighley’s Gameslice-ran award show dedicated to announcing worldwide game premieres and barely mentioning many award categories (while discarding Best Shooter altogether), a lot of people peeked their heads in to look at what’s going on. In fact, according to Polygon, The Game Awards 2015 were watched by more than 2.3 million viewers.

This is a jump of nearly 20% from last year’s numbers, according to Keighley, who hints that a Game Awards 2016 is likely coming at an unknown time and location. “Next year will be about adding other elements around the show,” Keighley said. “One thing I wanted to do this year was a big eSports tournament the day of the show, but we just didn’t have enough bandwidth to get it done.”

At the very least, an eSports element towards a Game Awards 2016 show (possibly as a lead-in) will cater to that audience in a way that goes beyond naming the eSports Team of the Year in an awards show mostly dedicated to mainstream, non-competitive gaming. It’s a move that Sony has done the past two years themselves, hosting the Capcom Cup in 2014 and 2015 to conclude the PlayStation Experience, albeit focusing on the fighting game aspect of eSports.

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With more than a billion impressions made on Twitter using the hashtag #TheGameAwards, stemming from more than 175,000 people tweeting roughly 279,000 times, it’s fair to say that The Game Awards 2015 was a successful second venture into the promotion and reveal of upcoming video games. And also the awards, of course.