The PlayStation Showcase 2023 was quite the fever dream for fans of the latest console, as Sony finally revealed its PS5 lineup for this year and more. With the anticipation at a high for this event, fans did not get disappointed with what was on offer, which in turn helped it become the most popular and watched PlayStation showcases ever.
This year’s showcase exhibition saw Sony reveal a bunch of upcoming games for the PlayStation 5 and the PSVR 2. This list included Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, gameplay for Spider-Man 2, a first proper look at Dragon's Dogma 2, and a release date for Alan Wake 2.
The PlayStation Showcase 2023 hit a stunning 2.6M Peak Viewers, thanks in large part to the disclosure of games like Spider-Man 2 — which received a lengthy gameplay showcase. What really got fans pumped was that they got to see two Spider-Men: Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
The former’s new moveset is based on his adoption of the Symbiote Suit, while there were also some flashy new moves from Miles for viewers to enjoy. The trailer also revealed another villain for a series that has recently provided some amazing games: Kraven the Hunter.
The exhibition also recorded 4.1M Hours Watched and 1.5M Average Viewers over an airtime of 2 hours and 35 minutes. These were record numbers of any PlayStation showcase held over the past few years, more of which will be discussed later in this article.
For an event this huge, there were more than 600 channels across sites like Twitch and YouTube broadcasting happenings, including community casting, which has always been a big help in making such shows stand out and reach a broader audience. This was seen in the fact that there were two streamers in the lists of most-watched and most popular channels live-streaming it.
When it comes to the most-watched channels, illojuan and American hotshot lirik finished in the second and fifth places, respectively. In terms of the most popular channels, the Spanish megastar came in third, while his American counterpart maximilian_dood was fifth.
Apart from Spider-Man, the other big talking points were the release dates for Assassin's Creed Mirage (October 12 to Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, and Amazon Luna) and Alan Wake 2 (October 17 to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC). Also, a Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater Remake was announced via a mysterious teaser trailer leading up to Snake's big reveal.
PS5 users were given even more reasons to rejoice as Sony announced a device — codenamed Project Q — using which players can stream any game from their PlayStation 5 console using Remote Play over WiFi. However, no release date was given for this new hardware.
As with most such showcases, English dominated the charts, taking up 64% of the overall viewership pie. It was almost the exact same share for the language from the previous event, the PlayStation Showcase 2021.
Spanish and German saw marginal gains in their shares, but French, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese fell slightly. Spanish, Portuguese, and French continued to be the next best three languages, with the former benefitting from star names like illojuan, rubius, and knekro giving the exhibition extra attention.
This trend was also seen in the fact that YouTube overtook Twitch to become the most favored platform for this event. The former saw an almost 10% rise, which was more or less matched by the purple site's almost 10% fall in viewership shares from the 2021 showcase.
However, both these mega-popular companies did perform better in every metric this time around compared to the show two years back, no doubt helped by more good news in the form of a new Final Fantasy XVI trailer and a new look at Street Fighter 6's story mode.
With so much exciting news in store for fans, there was no surprise that the PlayStation Showcase 2023 ended up becoming the most popular and watched such event from Sony over the past three years. It beat the next-best show by more than 170% when compared by watch time, while it was over 27% better in terms of concurrent viewership. In both instances, the exhibition that came in second was the PlayStation Showcase 2021.
In fact, the only show that even comes close to matching these numbers is the last one to be held before the release of the PlayStation 5. This showcase for the newest-gen console generated massive hype, for obvious reasons, doing 70% better than its 2023 cousin in terms of peak concurrent viewership. There is barely anything to separate them with respect to watch hours, although the most recent event has the lead on this count.
Considering the Playstation 5 Showcase is considered one of the most successful exhibitions ever held by Sony, the PlayStation Showcase 2023 can definitely be placed in that rarified category. Moreover, no State of Play event even comes close to matching these viewership stats.
With so much to look forward to for Sony and PS5 fans, 2023 and beyond promise to be milestone years for console gaming. It remains to be seen if these much-awaited and anticipated games manage to live up to the hype they have created upon release.
