The Game Awards 2022 ceremony was held in Los Angeles on the night of December 9. The event named the best game projects of the year and also summed up the results for the esports scene. The Streams Charts editorial staff calculated the number of viewers on the official broadcast.
The Game Awards is one of the major annual ceremonies that celebrate achievements in the esports and gaming industry. Winners are determined by a multi-stage combined jury and viewer vote on the official TGA website and Discord Channel. According to organizers, more than 55 million people voted in 2022.
The Game Awards 2022 was traditionally hosted by Jeff Keeley, and the show's guests included well-known actors and developers. Among them: Daniel Craig, Pedro Pascal ("The Mandalorian") and Bella Ramsey ("Game of Thrones"), voice actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson (The Last of Us) and others. They mostly announced the winners of the various nominations and new games' releases.
During the TGA a trailer of the new game by Hideo Kojima with the working title Death Stranding 2 was presented. Details about the project and the release date are not yet available.
More than 50 new games were announced at the ceremony. Among them: Death Stranding 2, Hades II, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Dune: Awakening, Remnant 2 and more. New trailers of Atomic Heart, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Tekken 8, Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, PC version of The Last of Us Part I and other titles were also presented live.
Winners
Elden Ring by From Software was awarded Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022. However, the leader by the number of nominations and awards was God of War Ragnarok — it won Best Narrative, Best Audio Design, Best Performance (Christopher Judge for the role of Kratos) awards, and so on. A total of six wins in ten categories. The jury also highly recognized Stray, which made it to six nominations and won two of them (Best Debut Indie Game and Best Indie Game of the year).
Valorant, a team-based shooter game by Riot Games, won Best Esports Game award. The Best Esports Event award went to 2022 World Championship in League of Legends.
The Brazilian team LOUD, which won Valorant Champions 2022 in Istanbul, was named Best Esports Team. Its coach, bzkA, won in the Best Esports Coach category. At the same time, Yay won the Best Esports Athlete award — he took second place together with OpTic Gaming in the same world championship, and after the tournament he joined Cloud9 White.
In 2022, the organizers of The Game Awards introduced a new category, Best Adaptation. Movies, TV series, or cartoons based on computer games were nominated in this category. The first winner in this category was Arcane: League of Legends.
Viewership Statistics
The Game Awards 2022 viewership statistics
The Game Awards 2022 lasted nearly four hours, racking up 10.8 million Hours Watched. The broadcasts drew 2.8 million Average Viewers and 3.42 million Peak Viewers, a record total in the history of the ceremony.
The Game Awards' audience reach grew for several reasons: first, the ceremony was first broadcast on Steam TV in 2022, and that's the channel that drew the most Peak Viewers — 845.7K. The thing is that every minute of the broadcast Valve gave away a Steam Deck console among viewers, so the hype was insane.
In addition, the audience reach of the ceremony's main official channels increased compared to last year. The PV number on YouTube increased by 48%, and on Twitch the number went up by 122%.
We should also mention the increase in the total number of channels that covered the ceremony. Whereas in 2021 there were about 470 channels, in 2022 that number grew to nearly 750. Among them were many top streamers who covered the ceremony on their channels: xQc, Rubius, Ninja, ibai, Hasanabi and others.
The distribution of the audience by platform looks as follows: 56.4% of the total HW were accounted for by Twitch, 35.1% were by YouTube, and about 8.4% by Steam. As for the broadcast languages, 76.9% of viewers watched the English broadcasts the most. Slightly more than 10% watched in Spanish and 7% in Portuguese.
Chat analytics of TGA 2022 on Twitch
The Game Awards 2022 broadcast had approximately 1.1 million Unique Viewers (73% of them were Authorized Viewers) in the chat of the official ceremony channel on Twitch. Just over 48.6K viewers were active in the chat, sending more than 161K messages throughout the broadcast — an average of 3.3 messages per chatter, or 703 messages per minute.
Elden Ring was the most popular game among all the nominees by the number of mentions in the chat, which eventually became the Game of the Year. Its name was written in the chat almost 2.5K times. God of War: Ragnarok is in second place — the leader by the number of wins and nominations had a little more than 2K mentions. The Top 5 also includes such games as Genshin Impact (718), Stray (566) and Sonic (342), but their number of mentions in the chat was significantly lower compared to the leaders. Interestingly, viewers wrote more than 1.3K messages in the chat about GTA, even though the game was not featured in any of the nominations. Most likely, they were waiting for the announcement of the sixth installment of the franchise or used the acronym to troll the name of the event (GTA / TGA).
Former Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé (559 mentions in the chat), game designer Hideo Kojima (494) and actor Al Pacino (296), who announced the winner of the Best Performance category, were the most mentioned guests at the ceremony. The Top 5 also includes the host of the show, Geoff Keighley, and Kevin Conroy, the voice actor known for voicing Batman in many animated films, TV series and games about the character. In November, Conroy passed away of cancer, but managed to record the character's lines for the game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The game's trailer was shown at TGA 2022.
When it comes to the most popular emotes in chat, ResidentSleeper takes first place by a wide margin with 33.1K mentions. It was used by the audience to express boredom, troll the hosts and hint that they need to talk less about abstract topics on air and get to the point quicker. For example, the announcements of winners, new games, or trailers. PotFriend is the second most frequently mentioned emote (6.8K), representing a reference to the Pot Boy character from Elden Ring. Viewers spammed it to celebrate the game winning the grand prize at the ceremony. In addition to these emotes, PogChamp (5.1K), LUL (4.3K), and FallWinning (3.1K) were also frequently mentioned in the official broadcast chat.
The Game Awards 2022 winners (gaming categories)
Elden Ring
- Game of the Year;
- Best Game Direction;
- Best Art Direction;
- Best RPG.
God of War Ragnarok
- Best Narrative;
- Best Score/Music;
- Best Audio Design;
- Best Performance (Christopher Judge for the role of Kratos);
- Innovation in Accessibility;
- Best Action/Adventure Game.
Stray
- Best Indie Game;
- Best Debut Indie Game.
Final Fantasy 14 Online
- Best Ongoing Game;
- Best Community Support.
Other winners in the gaming categories include Marvel Snap (Best Mobile Game), Gran Turismo 7 (Best Sports/Racing Game) and Splatoon 3 (Best Multiplayer Game). The Content Creator of the Year according to The Game Awards is the American YouTube streamer Ludwig in 2022.
The Game Awards 2022 winners (esports)
- Best Esports Game: Valorant;
- Best Esports Athlete: Jacob “Yay” Whiteaker (Cloud9, Valorant);
- Best Esports Team: LOUD (Valorant);
- Best Esports Coach: Matheus “bzkA” Tarasconi (LOUD, Valorant);
- Best Esports Event: 2022 League of Legends World Championship (League of Legends).
A complete list of nominees and winners is available on the organizers' official website.
