Ryan and Panic World producer Grant are currently on the ground in Minneapolis, covering the protests in the wake of Renee Nicole Macklin Good’s death at the hands of ICE agents. To follow along with our coverage, check out Ryan on Bluesky or Instagram.

The Game Awards’ Biggest Winner Wasn’t Clair Obscur, It Was The Show Itself

The biggest thing on the internet in December was The Game Awards. The livestream of Geoff Keighley’s annual video game award show reached our top five on Twitch, and the show’s YouTube channel beat MrBeast (we’ll cover him later) for the most subscribers last month. But we also saw its influence pop up around the internet, and arguably, the entertainment industry as a whole. Our data shows The Game Awards have something rarer than numerical success: Cultural impact.

Of course, we should start with that numerical success. According to The Game Awards organization itself, the ceremony on December 11th was streamed over 170 million times, a new record for the show. A report by StreamsCharts shows most online viewers were split relatively evenly between Twitch and YouTube, but the Twitch numbers needed to be aggregated, since over 21,000 other Twitch channels co-streamed the event.

That lines up with our data from Playboard, which shows The Game Awards’ YouTube channel gained almost six million subscribers in December, and the livestream peaked at over 1.3 million concurrent viewers. Meanwhile, on Twitch, the official broadcast topped out at 347,000 concurrent viewers, which was only enough for the fifth-highest peak viewership of the month (#1 was an awards show for Russian streamers, which peaked with 758,000 viewers). But TwitchTracker reports that just under 1.8 million people watched the broadcast on Twitch in total, meaning most Twitch viewers who saw the ceremony were watching another streamer’s commentary and reaction.

All those reactions tended towards outrage, since this year’s Game Awards weren’t just the most-watched but the most controversial, even ignoring the quiet DEI suspension. The true measure of an award’s importance is how mad people get at the winners, so it’s a good sign that even fans of the (very good, very French) Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 were surprised to see it win a record-breaking nine Game Awards. Along with the trophies, the wins came with a brief flurry of memes (which immediately got political), and a fresh round of controversy over the game’s use of generative AI.

Beyond the discourse, though, it also convinced a lot more people to play the game. Data from SteamCharts shows that after the awards, the game’s concurrent player count went from a daily average of 14,000 to 45,000 within a few days. Sales estimates from SteamDB show that the week after the awards, Expedition 33 went from Steam’s 12th best-selling non-free game to number two, behind Arc Raiders. 

This is exactly what awards are supposed to do. Whether or not you think Expedition 33 counts as an indie game, The Game Awards are accomplishing their most basic goal of giving attention and distinction to their winners. This wasn’t always the case — from the records we can find, there wasn’t any comparable bump back when the awards were called the Spike TV VGAs.

Don’t recognize that old name? That speaks to an more foundational influence The Game Awards are set to have as the industry moves forward. When they rebranded in 2014, leaving basic cable for streaming sites like Twitch and YouTube, they quickly and easily made the journey the entire entertainment industry is now haphazardly lurching into. 2025 was the year YouTube became more popular than literally anything else to watch on TV. The Game Awards, which went in the other direction and started streaming on Amazon Prime this year, has a first-mover advantage over the film and TV industry as they finally start to go completely online.

Less than a week after this year’s Game Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Oscars would be broadcast on YouTube starting in 2029. One obvious factor in the decision was the 1.65 million viewers who streamed the Oscars online back in March — almost exactly 10 times as many stream viewers as The Game Awards a few months later. But there are still plenty of changes the Oscars will have to undergo to transform into a livestream, and The Game Awards will be the obvious place to look for inspiration. Let’s hope they don’t introduce a razor robot.

This Was The Third-Most-Liked TikTok In December

For all the data on last month’s top posts, you can check out The Big Spreadsheet here.

Let’s Check Up On MrBeast

Our data for November showed that MrBeast had his worst month of engagement in years — so bad that he had to issue a personal apology. His numbers have improved in December, but only marginally. Playboard data shows he gained over five million subscribers in December (up from 4M in November, just barely ahead of this random grindset podcast bro), and his longform videos have averaged 36 million views in their first 24 hours (up from 26M in November).

Funnily enough, the most optimistic figures for MrBeast weren’t even on his account. On TikTok, the most-liked video in December was from a fan, who passed by YouTube’s apex predator in public and extracted a promise he could be in a video if the TikTok got 10 million likes. It received over 22 million likes by the end of the month, showing that MrBeast’s engagement strategies still have some success…at least for now.

In the new year, we’ve started to see that he’s taking a more active strategy to pump up his numbers. The centerpiece so far is “Celebrity Beast Games”, a video featuring all the biggest celebrities he could convince to humiliate themselves for a competition show. Based on both the talent involved (they lead with Paris Hilton and Howie Mandel) and the viewing numbers (back down to 26 million in 24 hours), we feel comfortable saying “more like Mr B-list, lol”.

Facebook Has Submerged Itself In AI Slop

Even compared to the rest of big tech, Meta has been especially eager to turn every single product and user they have into grist for the mill of AI. This is most obvious on Facebook in particular, even now you can’t see public chatbot conversation logs (they’ve been replace by something called a “Vibes feed”).

In December, Meta finally got what it wanted. All five of the most popular posts on Facebook were videos (i.e. Instagram reels) that had been labeled as AI-generated. What’s more, data from Newswhip shows the posts had the most engagement we’ve seen since we’ve started tracking in 2023, aggregating over 20 million total reactions.

Recently, Meta has started to stem the deluge of slop a little, offering new tools on both Facebook and Instagram to control your feed. But they’re too busy sticking their faces in it to act like they’re prioritizing users who don’t want AI: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri thinks we should start labeling human creations, not AI-generated content.

Meet India’s Biggest Debate Bro

The kids from Stranger Things were all enormous on Instagram this month. Data from Social Blade showed Millie Bobby Brown led the pack with 2.79 million new followers. But just behind her (2.63M new followers in December) was someone we had never heard of: A young Indian Muslim religious leader.

Shamail Nadwi is a 27-year-old mufti from Kolkata. Since 2021, he’s started multiple online groups aimed at promoting Muslim thought and education in internet communities. Earlier in 2025, Nadwi and his Wahyain Foundation put enough pressure on a major national school that they canceled a literary event because one of the speakers, poet and songwriter Javed Akhtar, had made atheistic and anti-fundamentalist comments.

The cancellation led to all the discourse and protests you might expect — Akhtar writes songs for Bollywood movies, so this quickly became a celebrity matter. Nadwi seems to have seen that shift as an opportunity, since his response to the pushback was to organize a public debate with Akhtar over the existence of God. The debate has gotten Nadwi all the followers and attention that similar tactics brought other online trad guys, like Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk.

Rian Johnson Was Bluesky’s 5th-Biggest Account In December

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a number-themed 2026 celebration.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***