I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday. Last year's award show has <100k views on youtube, and the first article mentioning this (insider-gaming.com's) is written by one of the judges involved.
I'll leave it up to the reader to judge how much of this is genuine and how much is jumping the twitter bandwagon to boost the award show's popularity.
That was probably The Game Awards[0], which is a big deal. I guess whoever is behind Indie Game Awards sees the name confusion as a feature rather than a bug.
I'm not trying to defend "The Indie Game Awards", which I also have never heard of, but The Game Awards are universally acknowledged to be a joke, and always have been. By runtime, it's 80% soulless, samey trailers for AAA games, 10% Imagine Dragons, 5% rooting for that coked-up clarinet player on the edge of the orchestra, and 5% Jeff Keighley rapid-firing off the winners of made-up award categories in under five seconds each.
He just pointed out (correctly) that the game awards that were being spoken of everywhere for the last few weeks were not the one related to this article.
I on the other hand will add a judgement to this discussion: if you consider the game awards a joke, which is the by far most watched event in gaming, eclipsing (by viewer count) other entertainment events in sports such as the NBA finals... You've certainly got "interesting" opinions.
The Game Awards 2025 had more viewers than the Superbowl with a total of 171 million global livestreams vs The Indie Game Awards (7.1k Youtube views and 433 Twitch views).
Sure, I know all of these things because me and all my friends make a tradition to watch it... to laugh at it. It's a hilarious farce. Which advertisers are fine with, naturally, but don't mistake someone admiring the spectacle of a catastrophic trainwreck for someone admiring the engineering of the railway. The actual awards given are a meaningless afterthought.
I don’t think the name confusion can really be blamed on “The Indie Game Awards”, it has to be on “The Game Awards” for choosing the most generic possible name.
Mostly daily browsing of twitter and reddit, r/livestreamfail + various discord communities. Note that i have heard lots about The Game Awards, but this is a different event.
How could it be spammed in previous years since this is only the 2nd year of "The Indie Game Awards". Not to mention the event only had less than 7.5k total views to the 171 million for the "The Game Awards".
