The video game industry, too, had its awards moment on the small screen with a glitzy event called the Video Game Awards that Spike TV broadcast live on its cable channel for a decade. The actor Samuel L. Jackson hosted the show in 2012, and the reality television maestro Mark Burnett produced it.
But then Spike, which has tried to make its programming less male-centric in recent years, seemed to waver in its support for the show. In 2013, the network scaled the event back, streaming it live over the Internet and whittling it down to a one-hour broadcast that replayed on the cable channel days later. Spike invited the host and producer of the awards show, Geoff Keighley, to do the online event again in 2014. A Spike TV spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Keighley, a longtime games journalist and television personality, declined Spikes offer. Instead, he did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: He created his own independent game awards show without a television partner, streaming it entirely over the Internet. The show included ways for viewers to click on ads and download games in real time.
We reinvented the award show model for a young audience in way that I never thought possible, Mr. Keighley, 37, said.
The show called, simply, the Game Awards is now the closest thing the games business has to its own Oscars. The second Game Awards show will take place Dec. 3 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, where Mr. Keighley is expecting about 4,000 attendees, compared with 3,500 last year. He projects that the Internet audience will be more than the two million who watched in 2014. While game companies were the only advertisers last year, he has nabbed Verizon as one of the sponsors this year.
The event is a tribute to the tenacity of Mr. Keighley, who risked more than $1 million of his savings to finance the first show last year. It also reflects the hunger among games publishers for the critical recognition that can spark sales of their products during the all-important shopping season in the final weeks before Christmas.
