If you’re on the anti-corporate bandwagon and hate that gaming has gone mainstream, you’re not going to like this news at all… not one bit. But it was announced that Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards for 2018 managed to achieve 1.13 concurrent viewers on Twitch’s broadcast, and that cumulatively across YouTube, Twitch, and other streaming services, more than 4 million people were reached globally, which is not an insignificant number.

The show also managed to surpass 26.2 million global livestreams, which is up 128% over 2017’s 11.5 million livestreams.

So not only did it have a fairly large live reach through the initial broadcast but there was a lot of viewership saturation that took place throughout the gaming community engaging in the content.

This means that The Game Awards is growing year over year. In fact, the numbers don’t lie and indicate that Keighley’s little experiment to legitimize a respectable awards show for interactive entertainment is being buffered by a lot of support within the gaming community. As you can see, each year, the show gets larger, and larger.

Livestream numbers to date:

• 2018: 26.2 Million (Up 128%)
• 2017: 11.5 Million (Up 202%)
• 2016: 3.8 Million (Up 65%)
• 2015: 2.3 Million (Up 23%)
• 2014: 1.9 Million

Creator of the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley, mentioned in the press release that he has no plans to slow down with the annual event, saying…

“Five years in, it’s amazing to see The Game Awards continue to grow both domestically and internationally. These results further validate our focus on an all-digital, no-friction approach of sharing this show globally across more than 45 video platforms, not to mention the growing interest and passion for video games around the world.”

According to the stats, the conversation and social media discussion surrounding this year’s event was nearly two times more than that of the 2017 event, and the Twitch livestream reached 1.3 times more unique viewers than the 2017 broadcast. Additionally, all related posts to the Game Awards across Weibo achieved a total of more than 56 million views from more than 310,000 unique posts.

So yeah… don’t expect The Game Awards to go away any time soon.