A Lot More People Watched This Year's Game Awards

This year's Game Awards event was a huge hit in terms of viewership, it seems. Organizers announced today that the show brought in 11.5 million viewers around the world, which is up 202 percent from the 3.8 million viewers last year's show had that set a record at the time.

The Game Awards is a digital-only event, streamed to places like Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer. GameSpot and other media outlets were streaming partners, too. The show is organized by games industry veteran Geoff Keighley, who also ran the previous version of the event, the Spike Video Game Awards, which ran on traditional broadcast TV until 2012. In 2013, Keighley launched an awards show called VGX; it was hosted by Joel McHale and was seen by viewers as a disappointment, generally. Keighley then invested $1 million of his own money to launch the first-ever Game Awards in 2014.

The Game Awards has grown every year since. Viewership for the inaugural show in 2014 picked up 1.9 million viewers, rising 23 percent in 2015 to 2.3 million. The 2016 show had 3.8 million viewers, and as mentioned, viewership exploded for 2017.

People were talking about this year's Game Awards on Twitter more than last year, with the number of people tweeting about the show doubling year-over-year, organizers said. A Way Out developer Josef Fares' expletive-laden anti-Oscars rant might have had something to do with that.

One of the new elements of this year's show was interactivity on Twitch, where viewers could denote their prediction for the winners of the main category. Impressively, more than 70 percent of viewers used the extension to interact. And on Steam, where the show was also streamed, people watched an average of 70 minutes each. The show ran for around three hours.

In addition to the awards (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild won Game of the Year), the show brought a totally weird new trailer for Death Stranding, while pioneering game designer Carol Shaw from Atari and Activision took home the Industry Icon Award. There were also game announcements, some of the biggest being Bayonetta 3, Soul Calibur VI, the first tease for the next game from Bloodborne studio From Software, and Campo Santo's In the Valley of Gods. A bunch of celebrities appeared at the event, too, including Norman Reedus, Zachary Levi, Aisha Tyler, Lance Reddick, Justin Roiland, Jason Schwartzman, and Andy Serkis. Conan O'Brien and the stars of the new Jumanji taped segments for the show.