Every year around this time, I find myself in the company of family or friends of friends I don’t see very often. Most of them have normal professions like ‘teacher’ or… actually 90 percent of people in my life are teachers. It gets annoying. Anyway, they ask me “anything new with your work?” and I say “The Game Awards just happened”. Every time, I get the same response. “Oh, right. What’s that then?”
I imagine the response would be a little different if I told them I had just been to the Super Bowl, or the Oscars (or Grammys, or Emmys, or probably even the SAG Awards). The Game Awards might be able to point to more viewers, but when people like Reggie Fils-Amie (former head of Nintendo of America) claim it’s “the biggest global entertainment event of our time”, it’s clear that’s not true. Even as the ceremony grows, it remains a disingenuous claim.
The Game Awards Is Watched In A Completely Different Way
First off, the Super Bowl (which Fils-Amie uses as proof that TGA is the biggest in the world) is not the number one entertainment event on Earth, and it’s such a narrow view of the world to claim it is. That would be the World Cup Final, and the fact you know what sport I’m talking about despite there being dozens of World Cups only proves my point. The most recent final between Argentina and France (AKA Messi and Mbappe) had 1.5 billion viewers. The Paris Olympics, though taking place over a month, also had 5 billion viewers (way up from the still massive 3 billion of Tokyo and Rio). The Game Awards will never reach these numbers.
Assuming every ticket for Avengers: Endgame was $15 (probably still high given global prices), 186 million people saw it. Higher than The Game Awards’ 154 million, but more attainable. And when it reaches that figure, it will still not be a cultural event on the scale of Avengers.
There’s a massive difference in how these things are engaged with. The Game Awards uses livestreams, and thus tends to be watched individually. That 154 million (still a huge number, let’s not forget) is therefore almost entirely made up of individuals. A few streamers co-stream it to their sizable audiences, or some watch in groups, but nowhere near the percentages of other events. The majority of people who watch the Super Bowl do so at parties, meaning it’s a shared moment and thus a far larger cultural event. It also means the official numbers (123 million in 2024) are lower than reality. The World Cup Final was shown in tens of thousands of bustling pubs across the world, each packed with fans not contributing to that official 1.5 billion figure.
This Bragging Helps No One
I don’t say any of this to drag The Game Awards down. 154 million is a huge number, and continues the ceremony’s ten year streak of rising year on year. It’s heartening that a show that made more time for speeches and awards (despite, admittedly, being backed by some of the best reveals in memory) rose in viewership. It signals that The Game Awards can focus on awards and still be popular.
I thought this was a fantastic edition of the show, and have praised it multiple times in articles covering the various reveals it featured. More to the point, I also found less to complain about this time around. The Keighley-approved Muppet ribbing felt like getting ahead of complaints rather than addressing them, but other than that it was a stellar ceremony and everyone who worked on it should be proud.
But not this proud. I mean, come on. “The biggest global entertainment event of our time”? It’s like a guy running for the bus, making it, and then deciding that counts as winning Olympic gold. Imagine you were in the gym (I know, it’s hard for me to picture too) and there’s a pretty big dude in there. If he told you he could knock The Rock out in one punch, would you be impressed by him, or think he was a massive SEO-unfriendly term? That’s what The Game Awards is doing.
This show can and should be celebrated for its continued success, and the numbers in isolation do offer up the opportunity for bragging. But taking up that offer is foolish. The day after the Oscars, people with little to no interest in film still know what won Best Picture. They could pick Timothee Chalamet out of a line-up. If you showed the general population a collection of cartoon robots, most of them couldn’t tell their Astro Bots from their Jenny Wakemans.
When Geoff Keighley or other key figures in gaming talk about the show in these terms, it feels like desperation to reach a cultural pedestal the show, and gaming as a whole, has still not attained. Gaming is no longer niche, it’s true. But it’s not the Super Bowl. There’s a healthy middle ground, and gaming exists within it, growing every year. That’s enough. Gaming has to accept that it’s enough.
