The Game Awards, the video game industry’s year-end celebration, announced its 10th anniversary show broke viewership records with an estimated 154 million global livestreams, up 31%.

That compared to 2023’s record-setting showcase, which reached 118 million livestreams. As I noted from attending the event at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, show organizer Geoff Keighley redeemed himself compared with criticism a year ago.

Through its streaming-native, no friction approach to global distribution, The Game Awards delivered over 154 million live streams across a multitude of digital networks, including YouTube, Twitch, Steam, TikTok Live, X, Instagram Live, and Facebook, as well as global viewership across China on a record-setting number of networks.  According to StreamCharts, Twitch, YouTube and other western platforms had more than 4 million peak concurrent viewers combined, up over 10% from TGA 2023.

On YouTube, the 4K TGA feed delivered a 35% jump in YoY peak concurrently to 1.3 million. Platform-wide (including co-streams), TGA on YouTube was up 28% to over 2.17 million peak concurrent. Over 4,500 channels co-streamed the show on YouTube, a new record.

The biggest moment for me was the tearful acceptance speech by Amir Satvat, who helped 3,000 people get jobs at a time when the game industry had laid off 34,000 people in 2.5 years. He received the first-ever Game Changers award, and it was gracious of Keighley to recognize Satvat and his work.

Satvat helped people find jobs by creating easily accessible job resources that aggregated all the open jobs in the game industry. Some belittled him for just creating a spreadsheet, but no one else did what he did. Satvat, who works by day at Tencent, is a quant and aggregated game job data that was no more than a month old and updated his work regularly, on his own time. He organized the job openings into categories like artists and programmers so people could find relevant openings more easily.

The emotional Satvat declared that you can’t make great games without great people, and that his parents taught him that his value lies in how he treats other people. He took these notions to heart as he created spreadsheets and more to serve jobs to devs.

The sad upshot of receiving this award in front of 154 million viewers? Some social media contrarians found fault with Satvat and wrongly accused him of various evils like “creating a spreadsheet,” self-promotion and participating in perpetrating the layoffs. He was guiltless of these transgressions, but Satvat noted the false messages received enough cred that he and his family received numerous hate messages and death threats. I know Satvat and his Good Samaritan work, and these hate messages are just so factually wrong and misguided. Satvat defended himself in a post and many have come to his side.

On Twitch, more than 11,000 channels co-streamed The Game Awards, and more than 4,500 co-streamed the show on YouTube, building to a combined 15,900 co-stream channels.

Globally, TGA achieved its biggest ever results with live distribution in China on a record number of platforms including live distribution in China on Bilbili, Huya, Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, DouYu, Baidu, NetEase CC, Tencent Video, QQ, Kuishou, HeyBox; in South Korea or CHZZK and Soop, and NicoNico in Japan.

Here are the historical live stream numbers for The Game Awards:

2024: 154 Million

2023: 118 Million

2022: 103 Million

2021: 85 Million

2020: 83 Million 

2019: 45.2 Million 

2018: 26.2 Million 

2017: 11.5 Million 

2016: 3.8 Million 

2015: 2.3 MIllion

2014: 1.9 Million

This year at The Game Awards, Team Asobi and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Astro Bot won a total of four awards, including Game of the Year.

Studio Zero, Atlus and Sega’s Metaphor: ReFantanzio took home three awards including Best Narrative, Best Art Direction and Best RPG. LocalThunk and Playstack’s Balatro also won in three categories including, Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game and Best Mobile Game.

The show featured performances by Grammy-Award winning duo Twenty One Pilots alongside d4vd and Royal & the Serpent who performed original songs from Season 2 of Riot Games and Fortiche Production’s hit animated Netflix series, Arcane. Snoop Dogg also took to the stage to perform music from his new album “Missionary.” 

With appearances from the biggest names in entertainment and video games including Aaron Paul, Ella Purnell, Harrison Ford, Hideo Kojima, Isabella Merced, Khalid, Laura Bailey, Sam Lake, Shannon Woodward, Statler + Waldorf, Swen Vincke, Sydnee Goodman, Todd Howard and Troy Baker, The Game Awards once again brought together the industry for a one-of-a-kind night of celebrations.

The Game Awards Orchestra’s “Game of the Year” medley, composed by Lorne Balfe, featured music from this year’s beloved slate of Game of the Year nominees including, ASTRO BOT from Team Asobi, Balatro from LocalThunk, Black Myth: Wukong from Game Science, Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree by FromSoftware, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth from Square Enix and Metaphor: ReFantazio from Studio Zero. 

The Game Awards gave fans a glimpse at what’s next in gaming and entertainment with world premieres of upcoming projects, including Borderlands 4 (Gearbox Software), Dispatch (Adhoc), Elden Ring Nightreign (FromSoftware, Inc. and Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc.), Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet (Naughty Dog), Mafia: The Old Country (Hangar 13), Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (SEGA), Split Fiction (Hazelight Studios), Stage Fright (Ghost Town Games), and The Witcher 4 (CD Projekt Red).

The Game Awards is executive produced by Geoff Keighley and Kimmie Kim. Richard Preuss is the director, LeRoy Bennett is the creative director, and Michael Peter is co-executive producer.

In a post on Facebook, Keighley opened up more about how meaningful this show was to him:

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but this year’s The Game Awards was our biggest show ever, up to 154 million livestreams — a new record, up over 30% from 2023.

Every year I tell our team that we can’t expect the show to keeping growing — what goes up eventually must come down — but then, somehow, more people show up around the world and join us to celebrate video games.

Numbers aside, this was a really special show for me on a lot of levels, personally and professionally. It felt like everything suddenly became clear about so many things. More than anything, I’m glad the fans and the industry liked the show and believe we do have the industry’s best interests in our hearts. Thanks to everyone who has supported us from the very beginning, through the good and the tough times. I get so excited thinking about the next decade and where TGA and gaming can go. We will keep building, there is lots of work to do.