Okay, that headline isn’t quite accurate. But, The Game Awards audience did break one (or more) destinations on the Internet. Namely Gleam.io. It was from that competitive sweepstakes platform that The Game Awards ran two promotions: one was to give away 100 Steam Deck OLED handhelds and the other was to give away 100 Lenovo Legion Go handhelds.
Unfortunately, when the livestream began for The Game Awards — the very popular annual awards ceremony that celebrates and honors achievements in the video game industry — that’s when issues cropped up in a hurry.
According to a Sportskeeda article, “When the (Gaming Awards) event began, there were around 385k viewers on Twitch and 884k on YouTube.” Of those hundreds of thousands of livestreaming users, it’s fair to estimate that many thousand attempted to try to log in around the same time and fulfill the requirements to attempt to participate in the giveaway promotion.
Gleam.io jumped on their X account to try to explain what was happening, and why:
We’ve resolved and most campaigns should be up and running properly again. The Game Awards campaign is essentially DDOSing our servers with over 850% normal traffic load, we’re trying to allow entries without affecting other campaigns, hold tight!
— Gleam (@gleamapp) December 8, 2023
As evidenced by the spike in the number of reported issues with Gleam.io, and by their own admission, it’s clear that the reported 850% spike in traffic was more than the platform could handle at once. Gleam also noted that some international participants were unable to join (then were allowed) and that “rate limiting” was used to throttle the flow of attempted sign-ups and participants.
The Game Awards campaign should allow Canadian & UK postcodes correctly now. We’re rate limiting signups until we can manage the load but if you’ve loaded the campaign already you should be able to enter this now.
— Gleam (@gleamapp) December 8, 2023
Given the massive number of viewers of The Game Awards attracted, while some of the giveaway participants couldn’t quite join or fulfill each entry option, this Hunger Games quote may be applicable to folks hoping to win one of those handheld gaming PCs: “May the odds be ever in your favor.”
