Game makers queue up in their best suits for their night

Gizmo ZONE

Movies have the Oscars, music has the Grammys and both have television, which brings the awards shows to tens of millions of viewers with their live broadcasts.

The video game industry, too, had its awards moment on the small screen with an event called the Video Game Awards that Spike TV broadcast live on its cable channel for a decade. Actor Samuel L Jackson hosted the show in 2012, and the reality television maestro Mark Burnett produced it.

But then Spike, which has tried to make its programming less male-centric in recent years, seemed to waver in its support for the show. In 2013, the network scaled back the event, streaming it live over the internet and whittling it down to a one-hour broadcast that replayed on the cable channel days later.

Spike invited the host and producer of the awards show, Geoff Keighley to do the online event again in 2014.  Keighley, a longtime game journalist and television personality, declined Spike’s offer. Instead, he did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: He created his own independent game awards show without a television partner, streaming it entirely over the internet. The show included ways for viewers to click on ads and download games in real time.

“We reinvented the award show model for a young audience in a way that I never thought possible,” Keighley said. The show — called, simply, the Game Awards  — is now the closest thing the game business has to its own Oscars. The second Game Awards show will take place on December 3 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, where Keighley is expecting about 4,000 attendees, compared with 3,500 last year.

Keighley and his production team last year allowed game makers to buy interactive advertisements that ran during the show. Viewers watching the event could click on the ads to download games that were nominated for the awards.

Last year, Telltale Games advertised a sale on The Walking Dead: Season 2, a game based on the TV series. Sales increased by 15 times during the weekend the awards show aired, producing seven figures in revenue for the game over that period, said Steve Allison, senior vice president for publishing at Telltale.

Allison said that the audience watching the show over the internet was more engaged than the audience for the Spike show and that the effectiveness of the online ads was a “great example of what can be done in this new era of streaming broadcasts on platforms.”