On the evening of June 8, the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles hosted Summer Game Fest 2023, one of the biggest gaming ceremonies of the year. For almost three hours, SGF founder Geoff Keighley and the guests of the event announced many new titles, as well as showed trailers of already announced video games and TV series based on games. Since another E3 was canceled, it was Summer Game Fest that caused a huge stir in the gaming community, which was reflected in the event’s audience.
Summer Game Fest 2023 lasted just under 3 hours, and during this time, the broadcast of the event collected almost 4.4 million Hours Watched. Expectedly, the largest audience was gathered by the official streams of the event on Twitch and YouTube, and the third in terms of the number of viewers was the YouTube channel of the American gaming media IGN.
In addition to the official channels (streams were not only on Twitch and YouTube, but also on TikTok), the event was also covered by many top streamers of the largest platforms, including Kick. The broadcast of the Summer Game Fest could also be watched on the Steam. In total, more than 500 (!) channels streamed the event.
According to all audience metrics, Summer Game Fest 2023 set a record in the series. This is the only event in the series that was able to collect over 2 million concurrent viewers at the peak. In terms of maximum one-time audience, the previous highest in the series was improved by 9% and the average audience grew by 2%. It may seem that the increase in metrics is insignificant, but it is worth remembering that last year's event showed a drop in metrics compared to 2021.
Although two of the three most popular SGF broadcasts took place on YouTube, it was Twitch that turned out to be the main platform for watching the event for many users: in terms of the number of broadcasts, Twitch occupied almost 80% of the total number of channels.
Twitch audience of the event actively discussed new announcements and other surprises of Summer Game Fest. And there were many reasons for active communication. The event featured the first gameplay trailers for the Mortal Kombat relaunch and the Alan Wake sequel, the release date for Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (the game will be released on October 20) was revealed, the big trailer for the third season of The Witcher by Neftlix was shown, and much, much more.
Perhaps one of the most memorable moments of the event was Nicolas Cage’s appearance on stage. The Hollywood star will appear in the future Dead by Daylight update as one of the survivors.
In total, over 263,000 people chatted during the Summer Game Fest 2023 on Twitch broadcasts of the event, leaving over 2.5 million messages. Of the streamers with an audience of several thousand people, Joseph Anderson and Games Cage especially stood out, with more than 25% of their audience talking in chats. At the same time, Baity Bait became the most notable streamer in terms of audience activity: the engagement rate of its audience was more than 39%, which is an incredibly high result for a streamer with thousands of viewers.
Interestingly, the most used word (excluding articles, and pronouns) during the broadcast was the word "drop", and this is no accident: after all, one could earn free Styanax in Warframe for watching the broadcast on the official channels of the event. Popular emotes also appeared in the top, as well as the word “game”, which is quite expected.
Among the many announcements of the event, only five collected more than 4,000 messages mentioning the names of the title. The unconditional first place went to the retro platformer Sonic Superstars, which will be released this fall on all major platforms.
The attention of the audience was also attracted by the first gameplay trailer for Mortal Kombat 1, details about Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (it became known that Eddie Brock will not be Venom in the game!), as well as trailers for the new parts of Alan Wake and Path of Exile.
Summer Game Fest 2023 made a splash, which is confirmed by the record numbers of the event's online audience. It is extremely interesting whether any other gaming conference of 2023 will be able to show even more convincing numbers.
