The Game Awards has been an honored tradition in Los Angeles ever since its second year running, but founder and producer Geoff Keighley has revealed that the show’s home theater for the last seven years may not always be its base of operations. Speaking Saturday afternoon in a live “Behind the Scenes” chat on Twitter, Keighley reveled that he had always planned to eventually move the show to a different city each year.
As a brief history lesson on The Game Awards’ location: Keighley founded the show in 2014 after having worked on Spike TV’s Spike Video Game Awards show for 11 years prior. He secured The AXIS theater at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas for the inaugural show, but in almost all subsequent years, the awards have been presented at The Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. The one exception to this rule was The Game Awards 2020, which were held in an entirely digital format due to safety concerns regarding Covid-19.
Fielding a question from a fan during the behind-the-scenes chat, Keighley pointed out that the concept of taking the show on the road has been on his mind since its inception. “Yeah, I mean, my goal with the show always … was like I’d love to eventually make it like the Olympics where we kind of moved to different cities, and I would love to do The Game Awards in New York, or Tokyo, or London,” he said. “Right. Those are cities that I love personally, and I think especially like a Game Awards Tokyo would be just insane.”
This year’s event will continue to be held at The Microsoft Theater and will, as in years past, be broadcast around the world by a wide variety of streaming services. The awards show is set to kick off this Thursday, December 8, at 4:30 p.m. PT, 7:30 p.m. ET, and 12:30 a.m. on December 9 GMT. As also discussed by Keighley during the Behind the scenes chat, the event will be shorter than those in previous years, which will hopefully cut back past criticisms regarding the show’s padding for time.
In addition to the show’s location, Keighley also fielded a question about the show’s timing. Held in December each year, one participant in the Q&A was concerned that the timing of the annual event did not accurately reflect all games released that year. He explained that the awards do not consider games released in a January-1-to-December-31 calander-year format, but he said that’s standard for most major awards shows, citing the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, and Grammys by name. If anything, he said, releasing a game near the end of the judging eligibility cycle can give it a boost in the fans eyes, as “recency bias” leaves it fresh in their minds.
