Where To Watch And What To Expect

It’s that time of year again: Geoff Keighley’s annual Game Awards ceremony takes place today, December 8, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles at 4:30 PM local time / 7:30 PM ET. Are you watching with us?

Thanks to a very helpful tweet from the official Game Awards account, we know you have the choice of watching the event on YouTube, Twitch, Steam or Twitter.

You may already have your favorite platform of choice, which is at least a fair way to decide where you’ll park your eyes and ears for about three hours. But as the tweet points out, you can watch the event in 4k on YouTube, claim exclusive rewards on Twitch (details below), look at steam (yes, Steam) to potentially win a Steam Deck (you have to register) or, uh, catch the festivities old social media website Twitter dot com.

Where to stream? If you ask me, the chance to win a Steam Deck is a pretty enticing reason to look at the prizes on Steam.tv, which is totally there. Valve promises to hand out one of the damn things for every minute of the awards. Valve’s mini PC is one of the coolest pieces of gaming hardware around, so that’s hard to refuse.

Read more: 14 Best Steam Deck Games of 2022

But maybe Twitch rewards are more your style. The full details of the Twitch viewership awards for The Game Awards are listed herebut here’s the gist:

• You must watch The Game Awards for 60 minutes between 7:30 PM ET and 10:30 PM ET.
• You must watch the show on one of the Twitch-approved channels (the official Game Awards channel is a good guess, but the full list is here).
• Rewards will be sent to your Twitch inbox and you must redeem them before December 10 at 3pm ET (that’s this Saturday, by the way).

But what do you win? It’s largely some cosmetic items, the only one I care about is the Warframe syandana if we’re honest. Actually, I hope it is Warframe and not Wraframe, Warframes evil twin with the goatee and sinister laugh. But there is also a free game. Have a look and maybe there’s something for you:

So you have a choice of the highest resolution on YouTube, a chance to win a Steam Deck by watching on Steam, or guaranteed (provided you followed everything above) cosmetics for Autumn guys, Warframe, Among usa deluxe edition upgrade sifuTwitch emotes from Cult of the Lamband a free copy of Rogue Legacy (on the Epic Game Store).

Or, you know, you could watch it on Twitter. Decisions decisions.

Okay. That’s where and when and what you could win. But what will be at this event other than superficial celebrations of complacency to fill the meaningless void that is our existence? (You can see the full list of nominees for tonight’s awards hereand i know at least one person who will tune in to have their heart broken when Xenoblade Chronicles 3 won’t win Game of the Year.) I could publish reckless speculation on my part (Half-Li—I can’t), but instead let me lay out what we’re pretty sure will be there.

• Come on, it’s Keighley. You know his choom Kojima will be there. Everyone is wondering what to expect from the acclaimed Japanese developer’s studio in a post-Death stranding world, but based on a typical mysterious tweet from the man himself (retweeted by the official Game Awards Twitter) it seems likely we’ll see Kojima’s latest jam.
• If for some godforsaken reason you enjoy playing music at a gaming event, you might be happy to know that Bear McCreary, composer for Battlestar Galactica, The living Deadand called a little video game God of War Ragnarok, will be present for a live performance from “Blood Upon the Snow” from that same game.
• We know that too a brand new trailer in front of Lot 2‘s forthcoming expansion, Lightingwill fall during the event.
• It also seems we’ll see a bit EA and Koei Tecmo are coming Monster Hunter-inspired game, Wild hearts. This one for sure caught my attention in Septemberso I’m curious what’s in store.
• Baldur’s Gate fans will want to check out a new look on the upcoming third entry in this legendary RPG series.
• We’re also going to see some gameplay from Jedi: fallen orderthe sequel, Survivor. It’s true because Keighley said so (and I don’t care because it isn’t titan fall 3).

In addition to the games, a number of important, possibly even posh, people are expected to show up. Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson will be attending The Game Awards ahead of the upcoming HBO adaptation of The last of us, expected next year. So will, uh, Animal of The Muppets. Josef Fares, Director of A way out and It takes Twois also expected to be there to amaze us all with its colorful vocabulary.

So that’s when, where, why and what we expect to see tonight at the Geoffawards. Sure, there may be a few surprises that we haven’t covered here, but I think they’ll get everyone watching. That, and all the free Steam Decks.