It’s time for The Game Awards 2023. That one night a year where the industry tunes in for a somewhat bizarre blend of trailers, marketing, hype, awards, and celebrity cameos.
The show kicks off at 7:30 p.m. ET / 4:30 p.m. PT, on channels like YouTube and Twitch. You can watch it in the embed below, or through one of the countless number of channels that will co-stream it elsewhere.
A big but difficult year for games
This is usually the part of the watch post where I speculate on what we’ll see there. We’ve already seen confirmations that games like Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio will be in attendance, as will Timothée Chalamet and Gonzo. Because at this point, the Awards must have to contractually include a Muppet.
Each year, I find myself feeling a bit more out on The Game Awards. I mean, at this point, they do feel like a known quantity. It’s an awards show, and I expect to see a few big announcements for the winners, with the rest quickly listed off between trailers for upcoming video game releases. For a show that’s supposed to look back on the year, it spends a lot of time looking forward.
And this year, there’s been even more discussion about where the Awards’ perception lies. The big questions around whether showrunner Geoff Keighley and the production will address the massive layoffs and industry woes, or if the show will make any mention of ongoing geopolitical crises. Heck, even the indie category got the discourse heated.
So to that end, we’re tuning into The Game Awards 2023, for what feels like SGF in the winter with an awards show bolted on. My expectations are that we’ll get a ton of trailers and teasers, advertising a future with exciting games for people to buy and play. We’ll also see some folks take the stage, earning some hardware for their hard work on the gaming experiences that moved us this year.
And it has been, by all accounts, an incredible year for games, with titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, and Tears of the Kingdom becoming instant classics for me. It’s also been an incredibly tough year for the industry, seeing so many workers struggle amid layoffs and closures. And at 7:30 p.m. ET, I guess we’ll learn whether The Game Awards 2023 is a show equipped to handle that nuance.
