While Kojima's OD may have received the most articles in the press when it comes to TGA 2023 announcements, YouTube views tell a much different story, with Light No Fire by Hello Games handily topping this particular chart. Rightfully so, in this author's opinion, since the debut trailer was by far the most impressive game demonstrated at The Game Awards 2023.
On top of that, whereas most developers brought CGI trailers or just mere snippets of gameplay to announce their new projects, Hello Games delivered two full minutes of actual gameplay from a multiplayer session.
The small British studio known for No Man's Sky is shooting as high or perhaps even more so than it did a decade ago when it announced its action/adventure sci-fi survival game set in a near-infinite universe. With Light No Fire, Hello Games is once again promising what's never been done before: a real-scale planet explorable with no boundaries whatsoever, where players can play together with no restrictions in a fantasy setting that already showed dragons, anthropomorphic races, and magic.
That's perhaps why the Light No Fire trailer already broke records on the Hello Games YouTube channel, surpassing 4.1 million views and becoming the most-viewed video ever posted on the channel.
Light No Fire has become the most viewed video on our channel in less than 24 hrs
that’s enough now, you can stop 😅https://t.co/6seWMpdBBJ
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) December 9, 2023
When adding the views registered on other channels like TGA's, IGN's, and Gamespot's, the total view count goes up to 4.65 million views, proving beyond any doubt that gamers have more than forgiven Hello Games for the initial missteps of No Man's Sky.
Sony Santa Monica's God of War: Ragnarok earned second place in this cart with the reveal of its Valhalla free roguelike DLC. The video's biggest performance was, as expected, registered on PlayStation's own channel, where Valhalla's trailer was viewed 2.9 million times. It also got a hefty 1.1 million views from one of two IGN videos, but even when adding that and the views registered on Gamespot and TGA channels, the grand total is still 'only' 4.26 million views.
Marvel's Blade from Arkane Lyon also got a lot of views, but most of them (3.4 million) came right from the Marvel Entertainment YouTube channel, which is a bit of a cheat for a videogame. Even when adding views from the TGA, IGN, Gamespot, and Bethesda channels, the total is 3.9 million views.
The rest of the TGA 2023 announcements didn't even come close to these three in the matter of YouTube clout. Jurassic Park Survival, the single player action/adventure horror game in development at Saber Interactive, also benefited from being posted on the Jurassic World channel, where it registered 1.4 million views. Monster Hunter Wilds got nearly a million views on the PlayStation channel. None of the others came close to the million threshold on a single trailer, though.
That a new IP like Light No Fire from such a small studio can elicit this sort of response from gamers is a testament to the power and ingenuity of indie developers. Needless to say, we'll be keeping a close eye on any updates shared by Hello Games for this massively ambitious game. Stay tuned!
