Game Awards 2015 pulls in 2.3M people, more than 1B Twitter impressions

Last year's inaugural game awards show nearly hit 2 million viewers, managing to crush Spike TV's Video Game Awards numbers. This year's continues the trend, jumping nearly 20 percent to 2.3 million viewers watching the two-hour show, host and creator Geoff Keighley tells Polygon.

That success, Keighley says, means that a Game Awards 2016 show is very likely, though it's too early to say when or where it will be held.

"With the growth this year and all the sponsor support, I feel pretty confident we will be back next December for The Game Awards 2016," he said.

Keighley said he was very happy with the format of this year's show and that he feels it addressed the three big concerns he had coming out of the inaugural show.

"A tighter production technically, a shorter run time, and more on-stage awards," Keighley said. "The format feels good, and it's been nice to see the audience response — two solid years means we're on the right path."

As for future plans, one thing this year's show wasn't able to do was deliver the sort of eSports coverage he had hoped to do.

"Next year will be about adding other elements around the show," Keighley said. "One thing I wanted to do this year was a big eSports tournament the day of the show, but we just didn't have enough bandwidth to get it done."

The top streaming platforms for this year's show, not surprisingly, were Twitch and YouTube. And the show managed to trend worldwide, with more than one billion impressions on Twitter with tweets using #TheGameAwards, a doubling of last year's social impact, according to media monitoring and analytics company Sysmos. More than 175,000 different people used that hashtag, writing about 279,000 tweets.

The top streaming channels saw more than half a million comments and Snapchat was used to deliver virtual access to the show and after party.

The show also made use of the Xbox One, allowing viewers to guess winners of awards in real time.

This year's show featured nearly a dozen new trailers and game announcements, performances by CHVRCHES and Deadmau5 as well as the awards. It also, for its first time, featured a minor scandal of sorts with Keighley telling the live audience that publisher Konami blocked soon-to-be former employee Hideo Kojima's appearance at the show.

Keighley says he believes the show broke even this year.