The Game Awards

• 1. A Show Born from Failure

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  The Game Awards began, in a sense, with a flop. In 1994, a teenage Geoff Keighley was brought in to help write material for Cybermania '94, the first televised video game awards show, which featured celebrity hosts William Shatner and Leslie Nielsen. The show leaned toward comedy rather than celebration and was not considered a success. For Keighley, that failure planted a question he would spend decades trying to answer: what would it look like to build something for games closer to the Academy Awards?

  Keighley went on to spend over ten years working on the Spike Video Game Awards, which ran from 2003 to 2013 and aired near the end of each calendar year on Spike TV. Samuel L. Jackson hosted one edition. But by 2013, Spike was steering toward a less male-oriented audience, rebranding the show as the VGX and cutting it to a one hour online stream before any television broadcast. Comedian Joel McHale co-hosted alongside Keighley that year. The 2013 show was widely viewed as disappointing and too commercially oriented. Spike offered to continue in 2014 but restricted to streaming only. Keighley declined, and the Spike show ended.

  With backing from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and several large publishers, and with some of his own personal funds invested, Keighley secured space at The AXIS theater in Las Vegas for the first Game Awards in 2014. Without a broadcaster, the show was livestreamed across console networks and Valve's Steam service, reaching a far wider audience than Spike TV ever had.

• 2. The Peacock Theater Era

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  The 2014 show at The AXIS in Las Vegas drew 1.9 million viewers. By 2015, the event had relocated to what was then called the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, where it has remained. Keighley renamed it the Peacock Theater for the 2023 listings as the venue itself rebranded. Viewer numbers climbed sharply across the decade: 2.3 million in 2015, 3.8 million in 2016, then 11.5 million in 2017-26.2 million in 2018, and 45.2 million in 2019.

  The 2020 show was held as a virtual event because of the COVID-19 pandemic and pulled in 83 million viewers. In 2021, with a reduced live audience due to ongoing restrictions in California and Los Angeles, viewership reached 85 million. The 2022 show returned to a full live audience once those government restrictions lifted, drawing 103 million. By 2023, the figure stood at 118 million, and 2024 brought 154 million. The 2025 ceremony reached 171 million viewers.

  Keighley has been approached by broadcast television networks offering to air the show but has consistently refused, valuing the freedom that independent streaming provides over the constraints a network would impose. The 2019 edition included a simulcast through a partnership with Sony Pictures at select Cinemark movie theaters across the United States.

• 3. Games of the Year

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  Dragon Age: Inquisition won the first Game of the Year award on the 5th of December 2014. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took the honor in 2015. Overwatch won in 2016. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild claimed it in 2017, God of War in 2018, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019. The Last of Us Part II won the virtual 2020 ceremony. It Takes Two won in 2021, Elden Ring in 2022, Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023, Astro Bot in 2024, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in 2025.

  Looking at the franchise record, Final Fantasy has received the most awards in the show's history, with 10 wins from 32 nominations. God of War follows with 9 wins from 19 nominations. The Last of Us franchise has 15 nominations. Call of Duty has received 2 wins despite 27 nominations, and Destiny has received 3 wins from 23 nominations. Clair Obscur earned 13 nominations in its debut year.

• 4. How Winners Are Chosen

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  An advisory committee sits at the center of the Game Awards voting process. It includes representatives from Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and AMD, along with several game publishers. This committee does not vote on the awards; its job is to select the media organizations that will. Keighley himself also does not vote.

  Prior to 2017, a pool of 28 industry experts and representatives selected the winners. From 2017 onward, that figure grew to over 50. In 2019, non-English media publications were added to the jury. By 2024, over one hundred media publications around the world served as jurors. Winners are determined by a blended vote: 90% from the voting jury and 10% from public fan votes submitted via social platforms and the show's website.

  Eligibility rules add an extra wrinkle. Only games released before a specific date each November qualify for that year's ceremony. Because jurors must submit nominations in the weeks before that cutoff, a game releasing close to the deadline may be underrepresented, since jurors rely on pre-release review copies rather than the finished product. Games releasing after the November deadline become eligible for the following year. Game expansions, downloadable content, remakes, and remasters are all eligible across award categories.

• 5. Reveals and Game Announcements

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  Keighley considers the crowning moment of the Game Awards format to be securing the first gameplay reveal of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at the 2014 show. He has consistently encouraged studios to bring new announcements and trailers, even for games at an early stage of development, and then personally selects which trailers to feature and works with studios on how to position them for maximum impact.

  For the 2018 show, Keighley worked directly with Nintendo on a trailer reveal for the Persona 5 character Joker joining Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The reveal was constructed to appear as though it might be teasing a new mainline game in the Persona series. Beyond individual reveals, digital storefronts including Steam, Xbox Games Store, Nintendo eShop, and PlayStation Store run sales on nominated games in the days surrounding each ceremony.

  In 2021, Keighley hosted the podcast Inside the Game Awards in partnership with Spotify. In June 2023, he hosted the Game Awards 10-Year Celebration, a live performance of video game music at the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

• 6. Controversy and Criticism

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  Commentators have long criticized the Game Awards for spending more time on advertisements for upcoming games than on honoring award recipients. The ratio of promotional content to actual recognition is among the most consistent points of complaint against the show.

  After news of Activision Blizzard's sexual misconduct scandal broke, Keighley opened the 2021 show with a statement denouncing abuse in the industry. Critics noted the statement did not refer to Activision Blizzard by name and appeared to prioritize preserving industry relationships over a more direct response. The incident prompted broader questions about the show's closeness with its business partners.

  At the 2023 ceremony, celebrity guests were given several minutes each to speak on stage, while award winners were allocated thirty seconds before being prompted to wrap up and cut off by music. In 2025, the Future Class program, which had recognized emerging voices in the industry since 2020, was placed on indefinite hiatus. Former members of the program stated publicly that they felt tokenized and described themselves as having been effectively props for the show.