The Game Awards viewership more than doubled in 2018 with over 26.2 million livestreams

News by Stephany Nunneley-Jackson News Editor

Published on Dec. 12, 2018

The Game Awards 2018 was a hit with viewers.

Last week The Game Awards 2018 took place, and viewership via livestreams were up 128% to 26.2 million compared to 11.5 million in 2017.

On Twitch, the awards show was the service's biggest livestream to date with over 1.13 million concurrent viewers watching livestreams at its peak. This is almost double that of last year's Twitch streams. More than 300 Twitch creators co-streamed the program live, up over 140% year-over-year (yoy).

The Game Awards was also the number one worldwide trend on Twitter for the fourth year in a row. In total, peak concurrency for the show is estimated to have been 4 million global viewers, which includes double the number of concurrent viewers on YouTube compared to 2017.

It also saw major growth in viewer voting. Online vote participation was up 50% yoy to over 10.5 million logged-in votes.

Participants were able to cast votes for The Game Awards across the official website, Discord, Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and in China via Bilibili.

“Five years in, it’s amazing to see The Game Awards continue to grow both domestically and internationally,” said Geoff Keighley in the press release. “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.”

Here are the livestream numbers for The Game Awards to-date. The figures do not include Video on Demand.