Games Done Quick (GDQ) is an institution in the gaming community. For 14 years now, the world’s best speedrunners have gathered together for a fundraising effort that involves entertaining audiences online with incredible feats of skill and hilarious challenges that push the limits of much-loved games. The event brings together an average in-person attendance of 3000 people every year, bonding diehard gaming fans together.
There are two main events on the GDQ calendar: Awesome Games Done Quick in January each year, and Summer Games Done Quick in July each year. The week-long SGDQ 2024 just wrapped up, having taken place from June 30th to July 6th. The proceeds of SGDQ go directly to Doctors Without Borders, giving viewers online a worthwhile reason to part with their money.
With such active, interested viewers tuning in, it’s worth seeing how SGDQ 2024 performed on live-streaming platforms and what types of games are capturing fans’ attention. It’s also worth looking at whether speedrunning is still as popular today as when the subgenre proliferated over 30 years ago with Doom.
Summer Games Done Quick Marries Retro Classics with Popular Releases from 2024
SGDQ 2024 continued the event’s long-standing ability to capture the attention of fans online. Over the week-long event, SGDQ 2024 generated 8.2M hours watched with an average viewer count of 51K. Keep in mind that this average viewership comes from one straight week of streaming with no breaks, making the figure even more impressive.
This viewership was backed up by impressive donation totals. GDQ sources its revenue from more than just direct donations: Twitch subscriptions, Twitch Bits, merchandise through GDQ partners like The Yetee, and purchases of each event’s Humble Bundle (a discounted collection of featured Steam games from the event) all count towards the donation total. For SGDQ 2024, the event’s organizers were able to bring in $2.5M – no small sum.
Across the event, a rise and fall in viewership took place in line with day and nighttime hours in America. Peak viewership on almost every day occurred around 8 PM ET – during the evening on both sides of the U.S. The event’s peak viewership of 88.5K naturally came at this time on Saturday 6th of June.
Around this oscillation in viewership, some speedruns brought in more viewers than others. There were two main categories of popular games: Retro classics that are permanent fixtures of GDQ, and contemporary popular titles from 2024 that have yet to be speedrun at a GDQ event. Looking at the latter first, Elden Ring drew in droves of viewers as speedrunner blanxz completed a glitchless run of the game for SGDQ’s penultimate run (which coincided with SGDQ 2024’s peak viewership of 88.5K). Balatro also performed well as a bonus run earned by the generous donations of viewers, bringing in roughly 56K concurrent viewers.
As for classic retro games, a four-person race through Super Metroid brought in 78K concurrent viewers as a long-running competitive segment at GDQ. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was also popular with 72K concurrent viewers, being one of the games that originated the speedrunning format with its multiple glitches and game-breaking shortcuts. Finally, SGDQ’s organizers capped off the entire event with a speedrun of the recently released remake of Super Mario RPG, even stretching to an optional boss in the event’s final hours to get across the $2.5M donation line.
Games Done Quick Events Are Making More Money, But Garnering Less Views
During Mitchriz’s no-hit run of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, GDQ achieved a massive milestone: In its 14-year history, the event had officially raised $50M for charity. This achievement was rightly praised, bolstered by SGDQ 2024’s $2.5M being one of the largest singular amounts ever raised by a GDQ event.
However, comparing SGDQ 2024 to past events reveals that the event may actually be losing steam. Prior to 2023, GDQ events consistently brought in over 10M hours watched per event, but 2023 and 2024 saw just 8M hours watched per event. GDQ’s founder Mike Uyama left the event in January of 2023 on good terms, looking to move on to his next big project. But since Matt Merkle stepped into the leadership role, it seems that viewership hasn’t quite achieved the same heights.
GDQ’s highest-ever viewership came during COVID-19 when AGDQ 2020 generated 22.1M hours watched. However, this wasn’t a single pandemic-era spike: Even in 2019, both AGDQ and SGDQ produced 22M and 19.4M hours watched, respectively. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why viewership has been declining since 2020, but it’s possible that the rise of other speedrunning events has fractured the speedrunning community into different strands.
Speedrunning is a Popular Attraction on Twitch
Though potentially fractured, the speedrunning community is still alive and well on live-streaming platforms. Looking purely at tags on Twitch relating to speedrunning reveals that speedrun content is thriving. In the first half of 2024, over 124M hours have been watched of speedrun content with the tag “speedrun” being the 17th most popular tag on the platform.
Broadening our analysis to include the tags “speedrunning”, “speedrunner”, and “speedruns” reveals an even higher number of hours watched over the last 12 months. Specifically, speedrunning content has seen two major spikes in viewership: August of 2023 and January of 2024. January of 2024 lines up nicely with AGDQ 2024, but the peak in viewership for August 2023 is more curious. As it turns out, a popular speedrunning event called RTA in Japan takes place in the summer, a 6-day long event not unlike GDQ.
Moving into the second half of 2024, GDQ’s all-woman speedrunning event Frame Fatales will take place from the 18th to the 24th of August. The event is another chance for the speedrunning community to bond together, but it represents one of the last in-person speedrunning events. Given the proven popularity of speedrunning on live streaming, there’s room for an event organizer and sponsors to enter the space and craft a spectacle-driven speedrunning event – perhaps sometime in April or October to fill the long wait between GDQ events. Stream Hatchet will be monitoring speedrunning’s shifting popularity in the meantime.
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