The Game Awards are not demonstrably losing viewers: the organizers reported more global livestreams in 2025 than in 2024. The sharper concern is what those viewers are being asked to watch. Trailers, sponsorships, celebrity appearances and other entertainment segments can make an awards ceremony feel increasingly like a marketing showcase, with less room for the games and people being honored. The evidence points to a tension over the show’s identity, not a proven collapse in its audience or prestige.
What “losing their luster” means—and what it does not
The Game Awards can grow in distribution while attracting criticism about its priorities. Those are not contradictory claims: one is about how many times the broadcast was streamed, while the other concerns the balance of awards, announcements and entertainment. The available figures do not establish that the event has lost viewers, that audiences are less satisfied than before, or that its cultural prestige has declined.
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The more defensible question is whether the ceremony risks diluting its awards identity as it expands into a marketing and entertainment showcase. That concern is supported by audience comments, press criticism of a specific ceremony and academic analysis of the show’s format. None of those sources, however, supplies a long-term measure of changing public sentiment.
Livestream counts are rising, but they are not a verdict on the show
| Year | Reported global livestreams | What the figure establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 118 million | The Game Awards’ announced total, as cited in its 2024 announcement. |
| 2024 | 154 million | The Game Awards reported this as a 31% increase over its announced 2023 total. |
| 2025 | 171 million | The Game Awards described this as an estimated number of global livestreams of the full broadcast, 11% above its 2024 record. |
These are organizer-reported livestream counts, not counts of unique people. They do not show average viewing time, how many people returned, whether streams came from the same viewers across platforms, or whether viewers valued the awards more or less. The 2025 figure is explicitly an estimate for livestreams of the full broadcast; it should not be restated as 171 million individual viewers. (Sources: The Game Awards, 2025; The Game Awards, 2024.)
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Why some viewers say the awards get crowded out
The format combines several things that different viewers want from the broadcast: game announcements and trailers, award presentations, performances, celebrity appearances and sponsored segments. NRG’s 2024 Winter Games Trailer Pulse report documents this split. Some respondents treated trailers as a main attraction; others felt that the number of presentations and cameos made the show too long or unfocused, or that sponsorships felt unnatural.
One respondent in the report wrote, “I felt that there were too many ads and not enough time for people to say their speeches while accepting their awards.” Another objected to “random celebrities,” while a positive comment called the trailers “the best part of the game awards.” These are comments from report respondents, not a representative tally of all viewers or evidence of a long-term shift in opinion. (NRG, Winter Games Trailer Pulse, 2024.)
The awards-versus-promotion tension is built into the format
The commercial logic is not incidental: upcoming games and advertising help make a large broadcast viable, while the awards give the event a reason to convene the industry and its audience. The difficulty is that these goals compete for airtime. An academic analysis of the 2022 ceremony found that 12 of 32 awards were presented on stage and described the event as both a celebration and a promotional platform. That is a case study of one year’s format, not a claim that every award is omitted from the stage every year. (DiGRA 2025 analysis.)
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The awards themselves are selected through a jury process. The official site says nominations are chosen by a voting jury of more than 100 media and influencer outlets around the world. That describes how nominees are selected; it is not the same as a public popularity vote, and it does not mean host and executive producer Geoff Keighley personally chooses the nominees. The distinction matters because viewers may expect a fan-driven celebration even when nomination decisions are made through a media jury. (The Game Awards voting jury.)
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Some criticism has focused not just on the balance of segments, but on how the ceremony treats the people receiving awards. Coverage of the 2023 show recorded objections to a 30-second speech limit for winners while celebrity guests received more time, along with criticism that the broadcast did not acknowledge the industry’s mass layoffs. These were press criticisms of that ceremony; they should not be taken as proof of universal audience opinion or of an identical problem at every subsequent show. (Summary of 2023 criticism.)
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The broader issue is visibility. A trophy presentation can recognize a game’s achievement, but a brief acceptance speech may offer little room for the developers behind it to speak. If announcements and entertainment occupy much of the broadcast, the ceremony may still celebrate games while giving their creators less of the public platform viewers expect an awards show to provide.
Keighley’s defense acknowledges the trade-off
In a 2025 interview, host, executive producer and CEO Geoff Keighley framed the show as a balance between awards and announcements. He argued that announcements broaden the audience and help the awards reach more people, while acknowledging that some viewers want an all-awards event and others want an all-announcements showcase. He also conceded, “But that careful balance is a hard thing to strike and we don’t always get it right.” That is the producer’s explanation of the format, not independent proof that the mix satisfies viewers. (2025 interview with Geoff Keighley.)
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Is The Game Awards still about the awards?
It is both an awards ceremony and a promotional event; the tension is not evidence that one function has entirely replaced the other. The ceremony’s jury, trophies and recognition of games remain central to its stated purpose, while trailers and announcements help attract attention and support the broadcast. Whether that combination works depends partly on what viewers came to see—and the NRG report suggests those expectations differ.
Calling the show the “Oscars of gaming” can also obscure its institutional role. A 2025 DiGRA paper argues that the comparison may be misleading, describing The Game Awards as closer to a press-association model combined with promotional spectacle than to a guild awards system. A separate DiGRA paper examines the history of video game awards and the cultural status the current show seeks to build. These are scholarly interpretations, not official descriptions or measurements of prestige. (DiGRA analysis of The Game Awards; DiGRA history of video game awards.)
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What would show that the luster is genuinely fading?
Livestream totals alone cannot answer that question. A convincing case would need comparable evidence over time, such as audience satisfaction measures, average watch time, repeat-viewer rates, or a consistent accounting of how much airtime goes to awards and how much to promotional segments. The evidence available here establishes growing reported livestream distribution alongside documented criticism of the format; it does not establish a measured decline in prestige or satisfaction.
The Game Awards’ 2025 Game of the Year was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an example of the games the ceremony recognizes. For readers asking whether the event is still worth watching, the answer depends on whether they want an awards program, a showcase of upcoming games, or both—and on whether future broadcasts give the award winners enough time to make the first purpose visible. The official site lists the next ceremony for December 10, 2026, with nominee announcements scheduled for mid-November; schedules can change. (The Game Awards official site; The Game Awards, 2025.)
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