VGX, previously known as Spike TV’s Video Game Awards, streamed live over the internet earlier this

month and was met with widespread criticism and mockery from all corners of the

web. But that is OK according to Erik Flannagan, Executive Vice President of

Digital Media for Viacom, who was recently interviewed about the show, and had

this to say,



“Death to us would have been

apathy. Death would have been no one talking, no one caring, no one having an

opinion about it.”



So if you’re one of the many video game fans out there

who hated everything about VGX and want nothing more than to see it fade to

black forever, all you have to do is ignore it.

But ignoring VGX is getting harder to do, as, since they changed

to an online streaming format instead of the old TV awards show format, their

viewership has skyrocketed. According to Polygon, VGX gathered 1.1 million

viewers who spent an average of 32 minutes watching the stream. That might not

seem like much, but it means a lot to the producers of VGX if people can sit

down and watch something for longer than they would spend watching a TV show.

It is also important to note that before they adopted the streaming format,

they were grabbing a mainly US-based audience, but now they are getting viewers

from around the world. To them, this justifies pushing forward with VGX next

year, regardless of all the hateful attention it has gotten.

All that attention might not be a bad thing after all, as

the criticisms are not falling on deaf ears (allegedly). Vice President of

Event Production Casey Patterson said,



“The only thing we can

do is assure gamers that we are listening. They can tell from the show we built

this year that we like them talking to us. Good, bad, ugly, we want to them to

continue to talk to us at the decibel that they have been.”



Geoff Keighley also had some nice things to say about the

viewership,

“There was a lot of great

feedback that came out of [VGX]. Sure, there were people calling for the date

and time of my suicide, but there were people who also were saying very

constructive things about the show. What I read out of it is that everyone is

very passionate about what we do with the show. They come back year after year.

But sometimes people get hung up on the Joel McHale-factor and don’t look a

layer deeper with things like No

Man’s Sky.”



No Man’s Sky is

the game that made arguably the biggest splash at VGX, which you can read about

here. Many

critics of VGX are willing to concede, at least, that the

No Man’s Sky’s world premiere was a smashing success, and it at

least justifies the existence of the show a little bit. Luckily it seems that

the producers have taken note of this, and perhaps we will see more content

like that at next year’s VGX. We can only hope.

Oh, and by the way, they intend on bringing back Joel McHale, insisting that he really is a big fan of video games and of the developers that he interviewed. Well, if that’s true, maybe he should have acted like it. Or maybe we should just give someone else a chance to host next time, maybe someone who will show that they are taking the event seriously. What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below!

Source: Polygon

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