Unpacking the Hype: Chat Decoder’s Breakdown of The Game Awards 2024

The Game Awards is an annual ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry, including the reveal of the Game of the Year and numerous other awards celebrating games released in the previous year.

This year the show reached 154 million global livestreams up 31% over 2023 across many live stream platforms including Twitch, YouTube, X, Kick and several Chinese platforms including Huya, Weibo, Douyin, DouYu, Baidu and QQ.

According to Streams Charts, The Game Awards’ official Twitch channel peaked at 397,518 viewers, while the YouTube stream reached a peak of 1,250,470 viewers. Additionally, over 11,000 Twitch channels co-streamed the event.

The gaming community is highly vocal, sharing their opinions across platforms like Twitch chat, Reddit, X, and more. These real-time comments offer valuable insights into viewer sentiment, the moments that generate the most excitement, and the topics sparking discussion.

On Twitch, creators have built communities where viewers actively participate by sharing their thoughts in chat. This unique feature distinguishes Twitch and its community from other live-streaming platforms.

To help make sense of the fast-paced activity in chat during live events, we developed Chat Decoder. This real-time Twitch chat analyzer provides insights into hype levels, trending topics, viewer sentiment, and overall engagement. It processes millions of chat messages in real-time, identifying the most engaging moments during a live Twitch broadcast.

Chat Decoder presents these insights through a dashboard of widgets, highlighting attention-grabbing moments, popular words and emotes, and the sections of the broadcast that resonate most with the audience.

Now, let’s dive into the Chat Decoder results for The Game Awards 2024.

The Game Awards 2024 According to Chat Decoder

For The Game Awards 2024, we used Chat Decoder to analyze three different Twitch channels to see how their audiences responded during the live broadcast. The three channels include:

1. The Game Awards
   The official Twitch channel for The Game Awards broadcasts the annual celebration of video games.
2. KindaFunnyGames
   KindaFunnyGames produces daily live shows hosted by a team of passionate gamers and entertainers, delivering gaming news, playthroughs, and community-focused content.
3. CohhCarnage
   CohhCarnage is a popular Twitch streamer known for his variety of games and playthroughs of both new and classic titles. With a focus on viewer interaction, he has built a large and loyal community that tunes in for his daily streams.

Hype moments

The Chat Decoder Hype Moments analyzer combines chat activity, exclamations, and engagement data to quantify overall “hype” during a broadcast. It highlights the moments that activated chat the most, defining them as key moments.

The Game Awards Twitch Channel

The Hype Meter graph shows clear peaks toward the end of the broadcast. Earlier peaks indicate key announcements during the show, leading up to the announcement of the Game of the Year Award 2024.

Hype moments:

1. Astrobot 2 win Game of The Year Award
2. Fallout wins Best TV Adaptation Award
3. Warframe 1999 announcements

The third place was shared between Amir Satvat winning the Game Changer Award and the conclusion of the show, where viewers shared their final thoughts.

Chat Decoder also revealed that the official The Game Awards Twitch channel lost approximately 35,000 viewers after the trailer for The Witcher 4 finished.

Kinda Funny Games Twitch Channel

The Hype Meter graph for Kinda Funny Games shows more evenly distributed peaks throughout the broadcast, reflecting the smaller but highly engaged audience. Interestingly, the audience on this channel appeared more enthusiastic about new game announcements than about the awards themselves.

Hype moments:

1. Announcement of Dispatched with Aaron Paul & Laura Bailey
2. The Witcher 4 Trailer
3. ‘One more thing’ announcement of Intergalactic from Naughty Dog.

Cohh Twitch Channel

Cohh’s channel shows a few big hype moment peaks that highlight significantly higher chat activity during these moments. Overall, the viewers seem to respond to the beats of the broadcast.

Hype moments:

1. Announcement of Intergalactic from Naughty Dog
2. The Witcher 4 Trailer
3. Amir Satvat Wins Game Changer Award

Interestingly, the biggest moment of hype on Cohh’s channel was unrelated to The Game Awards. It occurred when Cohh asked his audience whether they liked the “shared chat” feature. Cohh was co-streaming The Game Awards alongside itmeJP and Ezekiel III, utilizing Twitch’s new feature that combines chats from multiple channels into one.

Analyzing the Top Emotes

Another way to better understand viewer engagement and sentiment during a live broadcast is by taking a look at the emotes that are being used. Many emotes have a specific meaning on Twitch, which can differ for each channel. Understanding emote usage during the broadcast can tell you how different segments are being received.

The Game Awards Twitch Channel

On the Game Awards Twitch Channel, the prominence of LUL suggests that there were several humorous or entertaining moments. The use of GameawardsPOG and GameawardsHeart indicates heartfelt moments of excitement and hype, likely during big reveals or announcements. However, the presence of ResidentSleeper implies that certain parts of the broadcast may have felt slow or unengaging to some viewers.

Kinda Funny Games Twitch Channel

The most popular emotes on the Kinda Funny Games Twitch Channel during The Game Awards 2024 show a lot of their channel-specific emotes. These often have their own meaning on these channels and can create a sense of community.

Cohh Twitch Channel

On Cohh’s channel the Clap emote signifies moments of applause that highlight moments that were appreciated by the viewers. The LUL and KEKW emotes indicate hilarious or over-the-top moments that could be based on the broadcast or the comments from the streamer.

About Chat Decoder

Chat Decoder is a real-time Twitch chat analyzer that provides insights into hype levels, topics, sentiment, and engagement. It can process millions of chat messages in real-time to analyze which moments during a live Twitch broadcast are most engaging.

Chat Decoder shows these real-time insights on a dashboard of widgets to identify attention-grabbing moments, popular words and emotes, and the sections of the broadcast that resonate most with the audience.

Chat Decoder has been utilized in renowned events like E3, Twitch Summer Game Fest, TwitchCon, and Xbox and Bethesda showcases.
The platform is accessible through a web-based dashboard and the real-time Chat Decoder API. Each user has the ability to customize and manage their own dashboard and widgets.

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