The Game Awards 2015 host Geoff Keighley confirms the show was a success, pulling in 2.3 million viewers and getting over 1 billion Twitter impressions.
The Game Awards 2015 really pulled out all of the stops as having taken on feedback about last year’s show, the Geoff Keighley-hosted event was two hours down from three and yet it still managed to pack in some major world premieres into that timeframe.
Not only was Ubisoft on hand to showcase the first Far Cry Primal gameplay trailer, but there was a new Quantum Break trailer too, delighting fans of the upcoming Xbox One exclusive. With reveals like that, it should come as no surprise that The Game Awards 2015 successfully managed to beat the viewer numbers of last year’s event.
Speaking to Polygon, Keighley reveals that The Game Awards 2015 had 2.3 million viewers, representing an (almost) 20% rise in viewers compared to the inaugural Game Awards 2014 event which had 1.93 million viewers. Most people streamed the show via YouTube and Twitch, though it’s unclear whether people watched via desktop/mobile or if they used the PS4 and Xbox One’s dedicated apps to tune in. Moreover, while Keighley called the two hour show a “tighter production technically” as it had a shorter run-time and more awards, “the format feels good, and it’s been nice to see the audience response — two solid years means we’re on the right path”.
Also suggesting that The Game Awards event is on the the up is the sheer volume of tweets posted about it. ‘#TheGameAwards’ was a worldwide trend with more than one billion impressions being logged with tweets using the hashtag. More than 175,000 people posted tweets with it, totalling (approx.) 279,000 tweets and analytics company Sysmos says that this year’s show had twice the social impact as last year’s. Again, this figure won’t come as a shock to many people given Keighley’s reveal that Konami had banned Hideo Kojima from the show got everyone talking (and even Square Enix chimed in to criticize the publisher for it).
As for future Game Awards, Keighley says that the 2015 event broke even and so “with the growth this year and all the sponsor support, I feel pretty confident we will be back next December for The Game Awards 2016”. And while it’s far too early to know where The Game Awards 2016 will be held, Keighley does say that “next year will be about adding other elements around the show” and that one thing he would have liked to do is an eSports tournament the day of the show but he and the team “didn’t have enough bandwidth to get it done”.
Did you enjoy The Game Awards 2015? What was your favorite world premiere from the show? Leave a comment and let us know.
Source: Polygon
