The Game Awards and its inherent value.

Something we've been curious about for quite some time is the value of announcing a game at a marquee event. Specifically, we've always wondered about what kind of awareness it creates for a game, and what kind of sales can be attributed to it. We've been directly involved in everything from a small indie presence at PAX level events, to a marquee presence at E3 level events and we've often been left scratching our head and saying "Was it really worth it?". Having a presence at an event like E3, Gamescom, or PAX is quite expensive. For large publishers, events quickly become a seven figure budget hit when things are said and done. For indie publishers/developers the costs can get as low as four figures, but the return on key metrics correlate to that level of presence as well.

With Covid, there was a hard turn toward digital events as the physical events publishers relied on in the past were cancelled. Last year, online events suddenly found themselves in the spotlight as publishers scrambled to shift rollout planning away from location based events like E3. One event, The Game Awards, couldn't have been better positioned in 2020 to receive that attention.

From a cost perspective, The Game Awards is certainly more appealing for an announce than E3, but what kind of post-event awareness can be attributed to it? Fortunately, there were a couple of games for us to test our curiosity on.

For perspective, we wanted to get some kind of estimate on the value of announcing at The Game Awards. In this case, we decided value would mean an estimate of the market opportunity that was created based off of the awareness a new game received from being present at The Game Awards. Two games caught our eye for this, The Callisto Protocol and Open Roads. Both are indie titles, both had very compelling trailers, and both have made no marketing efforts since The Game Awards.

THE RESULTS

Based on our analysis, awareness was quite similar for each game and this was expected. Roughly 1M-1.25M US gamers are aware of The Callisto Protocol, and 1.15M-1.3M are aware of Open Roads. So as a benchmark, you should feel comfortable plugging in an awareness KPI of 1.2M for a Game Awards announcement in the future.

Where there is some variance is in our estimates of units. If either game had been released on this month (March), we estimate that The Callisto Protocol's US launch sales across all platforms would've been approximately 232K units, whereas Open Roads would've been a bit better at 326K units. We'll leave it to you to calculate revenue based off of our unit estimates and to debate why there is a difference, but The Game Awards carries considerably more weight than we expected, at least with indie gamers.

The unit estimates don't seem unreasonable to us. The Game Awards encapsulates everything positive about a digital event:

• Gamers can watch it from the comfort of their home.

• It isn't an overwhelming time investment.

• It's easy to watch online if you missed it.

• The digital format affords the opportunity to curate trailers and advertisements, a key ingredient in becoming a taste-maker for any audience.

For publishers and developers, announcing at a digital event like The Game Awards is akin to the Super Bowl. A post-event, water cooler moment is almost assured because players will talk about the trailers they loved the most for the next few days. Whereas an event like E3 or Gamescom is more like the summer or winter Olympics. There are many, many things going on over many days and it's very difficult to take away anything other than medal counts and new records. At best, anyone not in attendance is just checking the headlines as the event unfolds (take note E3 and Gamescom).

COUNTER ARGUMENT

Announcing a game at any marquee event without giving players the opportunity to pre-order the game, or without the budget to continue the conversation makes the platform (digital vs location-based) irrelevant. For Open Roads and The Callisto Protocol, the presence at The Game Awards was meaningless. Awareness windows are much, much smaller than they once were, and players are over-saturated with media from all areas of their lives. When announcing a game, the platform doesn't matter if the roll-out strategy is built on traditional methodologies. The days of announcing a game 18-24 months before release are gone, don't do it.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The Game Awards had a greater impact on future awareness for our two video game candidates than we expected, but like any announcement, the results are meaningless if players have no actionable steps to follow on. However, make no mistake about it, The Game Awards has a bright future and it will be the announce darling for the video game industry in 2021.

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