Last Sunday saw the finale of the first live event since the beginning of the pandemic — the Games Done Quick series event. It was held in Bloomington, Minnesota, from June 26 to July 3, at the DoubleTree Hilton Hotel. Streams Charts tells about the event, how much money was raised for charity, and how many viewers followed it online.
Games Done Quick has been hosting biannual charity marathons of video games speedruns for 12 years now. Awesome Games Done Quick raises money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, while SGDQ raises money for Doctors Without Borders.
SGDQ photos by JessTheIguana, indyK1ng & SeaAverage
The organizers received more than 40 thousand donations for a total of $3.021 million at the last event. This is the third highest result in the history of the organization (AGDQ 2022 and SGDQ 2019 raised more). In total, the organizers have donated more than $40 million to charity throughout the history of the series.
Speaking of games, more than 130 titles were completed at SGDQ 2022, including Elden Ring, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, The Legend of Zelda series, Control, and many others. You can watch replays of all the runs on the organizers' YouTube channel.
SGDQ 2022 Viewership Statistics
Throughout the event, the main English broadcast of Summer Games Done Quick regularly ranked in the Top 10 channels on Twitch by Peak Viewers, but the overall statistics of the event were rather modest compared to previous events in the series.
The event was broadcast for a total of almost 160 hours, and viewers spent more than 12.3 million hours watching it. The Average Viewers number at the marathon was over 77.2K people.
SGDQ 2022 reached its biggest audience on the final day: more than 114K Peak Viewers watched the Super Mario 64 walkthrough. We should remind you that in addition to the main English-language stream, the organizers also restreamed the event in other languages: French (10.3K PV) and Japanese (6.1K PV) attracted the largest audience among them.
Even though Games Done Quick finally returned to the offline event format, it didn't help the event attract more online viewers. Overall, SGDQ 2022 showed numbers that are comparable to past events, but the Peak Viewers number was the lowest among the marathons in the series.
The lowest PV number was previously recorded for the pandemic SGDQ 2020 Online, which was watched by just over 121.4K people at one time. The current tournament attracted 7K PV fewer.
At the same time, SGDQ 2022 turned out to be far from the weakest event by Average Viewers: in particular, it was ahead of the 2021-2022 summer events. We recall that the most popular and watched marathon of the series remains the last pre-pandemic event AGDQ 2020 with a Peak Viewers number of 263K people and 22.1 million Hours Watched.
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Despite the return of the offline format, GDQ did not improve its online audience numbers, and by some metrics, the past event ended up being one of the weakest in the series. However, this does not mean that the interest of the audience for the event drops, and we can see that from the sums the organizers raise for charity. Moreover, the audience fluctuations in general are quite typical for the marathons of the series.
The next event from GDQ will be Flame Fatales, which will be hosted by the Girl Spearrunners. It runs from August 21-27 online.
Header Image: Games Done Quick by indyK1ng