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Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 raised $2.7 million for the Prevent Cancer foundation, after a week of speedruns and livestreams.
AGDQ 2021 successfully raised money for charity
Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 is a fundraising event for speedrunners, lasting seven days from January 4 to 11. Speedrunners spent the week playing games and trying to finish them as quickly as possible. For this year, AGDQ 2021 was done entirely online, a departure from the usual runs with live crowds. Hence, the event saw record numbers in its livestream numbers, as countless gamers tuned in to watch.
For the duration of the event, speedrunners were able to raise a total of $2,764,447.03. This is the second highest AGDQ turnout, just behind of last year's $3,164,002.
25,658 donors donated 42,097 times throughout the course of the event. The highest amount donated by a single donation was $187,084.08, and averaging at $65.67. The median donation amount was $25.00.
A total of 91 speedrunning sessions were attempted during the event, with all sorts of genres represented.
With AGDQ 2021 behind them, Games Done Quick is already preparing for the next one. Summer Games Done Quick 2021 will be held between June and August this year.
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That wraps up what has been a phenomenal #AGDQ2021! Your support this entire week has been nothing short of spectacular, and we can't thank you all enough!#SGDQ2021 awaits us, and details will come. We'll have regular Hotfix content on our Twitch until then, so stick around! pic.twitter.com/MYKHO30nMP
— Games Done Quick 🔜 #SGDQ2024 (@GamesDoneQuick) January 10, 2021
What is ‘speedrunning'?
Gamers do ‘speedruns', a combination of the words ‘speed' and ‘run'. As you can already derive from this, it's the act of finishing games as quickly as possible. There are different rules for different kinds of speedrunning, and most of them involve the use of bugs, glitches, and exploits. Some speedruns require players to 100% complete the game, with all collectibles, achievements, and unlockables. Meanwhile, there are also ‘any%' runs, which is just a race from the opening title to the end credits.
Gamers like watching speedrunners as they usually have useful insight in the games they play. To be able to speedrun, practitioners need to understand the game in and out. They usually share their knowledge while doing their runs, providing viewers with information that they would otherwise not know. One great example of this was when Tomatoangus broke out a prop and explained an exploit in Fallout 4 that saved him 40 seconds of game time. His explanation took a grand total of three minutes, which just made the explanation the more amusing.
Games Done Quick has been organizing speedrunning events for charity since 2010. Donors may receive rewards, such as deciding what the player character will wear during the run, and sometimes even physical collector's items. However, most donors don't receive anything from their donations.
