The Game Awards’ Giveaways Were A Hot Mess

The Game Awards giveaway loading queue

The Game Awards 2023 took place last night, and the event was filled with announcements and surprisingly little time spent on awards. It was also supposed to have a few high-profile giveaways, but everything went very wrong.

Two big giveaways were planned for The Game Awards: one giving away 100 Steam Deck OLEDs, and one giving away 100 Lenovo Legion Gos. They’re both handheld gaming PCs, and they’re both worth about $700 each, making them very desirable for anybody who tuned in.

Unlike previous years, which held giveaways using Twitch integration and other strange methods, The Game Awards went for Gleam, a dedicated competition platform, to run its two big competitions. Unfortunately, it seems like Gleam was not prepared for millions of people rushing to sign up at once, and it went down within seconds of the competitions going live.

At first, attempting to load the page would give you a notice that scheduled maintenance was in progress. After a short while, the page changed to one that said an update was in progress, even though it was pretty clear everything just crashed and things weren’t working.

Eventually, Gleam seemed to recover somewhat, but its approach wasn’t great. The site started using Cloudflare’s Waiting Room service, effectively putting everyone who tried to access the site into a queue. Unfortunately, that queue was very long — the lowest time we saw for it was 1 hour and 56 minutes, but users on Twitter reported queues over four hours long… longer than The Game Awards, which was the ending point for the competitions.

Those that did get in found other issues, too. At the start of the campaign, only US postcodes worked, so potential applicants from countries like Canada and the UK weren’t able to enter at all. It was all very, very messy.

Gleam said on Twitter that The Game Awards “essentially DDOS[ed]” its servers, with a traffic load of over 850% normal traffic. The company says it had no heads up on the level of traffic either, because the app is self-serviced, and The Game Awards seemingly didn’t reach out to give a bit of a warning so the company could bulk up its servers for the day.

Neither The Game Awards nor its host and creator Geoff Keighley have commented on the bungled giveaway campaigns yet, and honestly, we’re not expecting much. Presumably some people were able to get in and enter, and those people are walking away with a Steam Deck OLED or a Lenovo Legion Go. For everyone else, well, there’s always next year.

Related: The Next Monster Hunter Game Announced At The Game Awards