spike-tv posts

Last Saturday's broadcast of the 2010 Video Game Awards on Spike TV was actually less about the awards and more about the many game announcements and trailers that were shown during the event. But did all of that translate into people watching the awards show?

Variety has the ratings breakdown for this year's award and its somewhat of a mixed bag for Spike TV. Overall ratings for the 2010 VGA came in at 627,000 viewers which is a 3 percent drop from last year and is also the fourth straight year that the broadcast lost overall viewers. On the other hand the much valued (by TV advertisers) 18-49 age group actually rose ratings 12 percent. Overall the 18-34 age group went up 5 percent and men aged 18-34 went up 15 percent. So it seems that even with overall losses the VGAs are hitting the right demographic in terms of viewers.

StarCraft II managed to win two awards in the 2010 Video Game Awards on Spike TV earlier tonight. Blizzard's hit RTS game won for Best PC Game as well as for Best Performance By A Human Female for actress Tricia Helfer's voice work as Sarah Kerrigan. Other notable winners for games that came out for the PC include Call of Duty Black Ops for Best Shooter, Mass Effect 2 for Best RPG and Need For Speed Hot Pursuit for Best Driving Game.

The award ceremony itself was better produced than most of the previous ceremonies. The show featured a number of clever virtual stage and prop elements that could be seen by the TV viewers but not the live audience. Host Neil Patrick Harris did a solid and entertaining job as the show's overall host (although he hinted at the very end that this would be the last awards show he would do which would be a shame). Once again the actual giving out of the awards took up only a small fraction of the broadcast in favor of all of the world premiere trailers for various upcoming games.

So what's going to be different about this Saturday's Video Game Awards on Spike TV compared to previous years? We already know that the show will be a bit classier thanks to the decision to pick Neil Patrick Harris as the overall host. Now, via a chat with Entertainment Tonight's web site (yes we are linking to an ET news story; the apocalypse must be near) Harris states that the awards set will also be a bit different.

Harris says, "Rather than having lots of set pieces everywhere, the sets are going to be done digitally." That should be ... interesting to see if that can be pulled off well. Harris also calls himself a "medium-sized video gamer" (he plays Call of Duty; we guess that qualifies). Harris says that as far as his style of hosting he likes to become one of the Rat Pack, saying, "I try to be as drunk as Dean Martin, that makes it all go away much faster." Indeed.

In a bit of a surprise, Spike TV has announced that actor Neil Patrick Harris will be the overall host for Saturday night's broadcast of its annual Video Game Awards. Harris, the star of the "legend - wait for it - dary" sitcom How I Met Your Mother, has had a lot of TV awards hosting experience, including heading up the 2009 Emmy Awards.

While the Video Game Awards have had hosts in the past, Spike TV made the decision to dump having an overall host for the 2009 edition of the award ceremony. The 2010 version will also have 13 "world premiere" trailers of upcoming games.

Spike TV's Video Game Awards broadcast is now nine days away and the video teasers of what games will get their official reveal continue to be sent out. A new video today has GameTrailersTV show Geoff Keighley talking more about the BioWare game that will be officially announced during the December 11 event. Keighley states that a snippet of gameplay from the BioWare title released last month is "not all set in that location that you see. You may see something else in there that will get you pretty excited."

The speculation has been that the game is Mass Effect 3, a multiplayer shooter set in the Mass Effect universe or something else entirely. You can check out the new video after the jump:

As it does every year, Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards pretty much make the actual awards ceremony secondary next to all of the world premiere trailers that reveal mostly unannounced games. In the latest TV commercial promoting the December 11 event it looks like an image slipped in that may or may not be one of those unannounced games.

As you can see from the image above it would seem like its a zombie-based game with some speculating it could be related to Valve's Left 4 Dead series (which refer to its zombies as "infected" in its game universe). The bottom right hand corner has "1 of 3" that set up to be upside down. What does it all mean? Is it a hint about an announcement for Left 4 Dead 3 or is it something else? Stay tuned.

[Via VG247.com]

Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards are the highest profile awards ceremony in the game industry and for the 2010 edition they will be broadcast live on December 11 from Los Angeles. Today the Spike TV web site revealed the nominees for all 30 categories (sadly, still no strategy category).

The nominees for the Best PC Game this year include Mass Effect 2 (also named as a nominee for Game of the Year), Fallout New Vegas, Civilization V and StarCraft II. Spike TV's Geoff Keighley "tweeted" that this year's award ceremony is being produced and directed by Hamish Hamilton who directed this year's Oscar TV broadcast. He states, "You'll see a bold new take on the show."

With E3 2010 just around the corner, GameTrailersTV is prepping for their second annual pre-E3 TV special. The show will be broadcast on the Spike TV cable channel on June 11 at 11 pm Eastern time. It's host Geoff Keighley has been giving hints about what will be shown for the first time during the special on his Twitter page.

Earlier this week he revealed that the first trailer for Dead Space 2 would be premiering on the special, giving us our first look at footage from EA's upcoming sci-fi survival horror sequel. In addition other trailers (non-PC related) for Killzone 3 and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 will make their first appearance during the special.

Just between you and us, we actually enjoyed the 2009 edition of the Video Game Awards broadcast from Spike TV last December. There were tons of new game reveals and trailers, the awards actually went to people and games we supported and there were only one or two parts of the show that were arkward to watch (Jersey Shore cast and Mike Tyson, we are lookin at you).

However it looks like the improvements this year didn't translate to ratings. Variety's Cut Scene blog reports that the show had just 647,000 viewers tuned into the show last December. Including DVR ratings (people who watch the show up to seven days after the event) raised the ratings to just 691,00 viewers. That's compared to 680,000 live viewers for the 2008 awards and a whopping 921,000 live viewers in 2007.

Tonight at 8 pm Eastern Time Spike TV broadcasts their annual Video Game Awards. It's by far the highest profile awards ceremony for the PC and video games industry and while in the past the show has sometimes been more about the celebs promoting their upcoming projects this year looks like it will have a lot more "games" in the show.

The VGAs are not only honor games released in the past 12 months but also show off glimpses of upcoming titles. At 3 pm today (about an hour after this post goes live) you can go to the VGA web site and stream a live feed showing off the rehersals for tonight's show where we are promised that we will see a glimpse of one of the world premiere games that will be shown on the telly tonight

At the moment we have been given the heads-up on trailers showing off the next (modern day) Medal of Honor game, the new Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands title, a new unnamed Star Wars game, the first look at the new Tron game, an officially unnamed 2K Games shooter (which most people believe is a revival of the Spec Ops franchise) and two completely unknown game titles. And we are promised that the show itself will still have some surprises.