It was a successful night for The Game Awards 2014 last week, with 1.93 million viewers reported for the event, which is an increase of over 75% from the amount of people who watched VGX last year. Of those 1.93 million viewers, each person watched an average of 28 minutes of the show.
Producer Geoff Keighley talked about the numbers:
I am absolutely stunned by the results. We didn’t have any marketing budget or TV spots for the show. I’m used to having a lot of support resources – a promotional team, a digital media team, a PR team. All we had was the support of the game publishers and fans to spread the word and on social media.
He added:
I was really happy with how things turned out. Certainly the audience numbers were well beyond my wildest dreams, and creatively I’m proud of what we put on the screen. Moments like the tribute to Ken and Roberta Williams and the Koji Kondo/Imagine Dragons performance were once in a lifetime experiences.
It wasn’t all positive for The Game Awards, with Keighley saying he would have liked to see more awards given out on stage, with maybe fewer world premieres. The event also ran an hour longer than planned, with some audio glitches also thrown in. “In many ways I made a show more ambitious than the budget we had,” he said.
Even with good viewership, Keighley didn’t make any money from The Game Awards, with only 3,000 of the 4,000 seats at the venue filled, and only about 1,500 of the audeience paid the $45 to get in, with the rest being made up of industry attendees.
“I didn’t make money on the show, but I always knew it would be an investment,” he said. “If I’m going to invest in anything it’s going to be to support the industry which has given me my whole career.”
As for a potential The Game Awards 2015, Keighley doesn’t know if it will happen, but he added, “I’d definitely like to see it continue on if publishers and fans want to keep it going.”
Would you like to see The Game Awards return next year?
[Source: Polygon]
