January 2020. I spent all of AGDQ 2020 watching the stream and got curious enough to actually dig into the data. This was written up as a featured project for UpLevel, an ed-tech startup I was part of at the time.
Awesome Games Done Quick is a semiannual speedrunning charity marathon — games played as fast as possible, live on Twitch, with donations rolling in from viewers. AGDQ 2020 ran January 5–12 and raised a record $3.1M for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
approach
Four steps: scrape the GDQ tracker, visualise the donation data, get runner metrics, and perform text analytics on the donation comments.
the data
Two datasets from the GDQ tracker:
- Donations — 54,100 records with donor name, timestamp, amount, and whether a comment was included
- Runs — 139 games with runner names, consoles, and segment lengths
Two rounds of scraping: one for the main donation table (1,083 pages), a second to retrieve actual comment text from individual donation pages. Used ThreadPoolExecutor with 3 concurrent workers to keep it manageable. Still took two days.
I matched each donation to the game being streamed at the time, which made per-game analysis possible.
what I found
Donations over time. Linear for the first six days, then a sharp spike at the end — caused by a $356,306 bulk donation from the GDQ team itself during the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer run. That was a rollup of Twitch subscriptions, bits, and sponsorships, not individual donor behaviour, so it was stripped from most subsequent analysis.
Top games by donations raised (individual donors, bulk excluded):
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer — $352,485
- Clone Hero (Guitar Hero) — $263,248
- Pokémon X/Y — $174,860
- Katana Zero — $131,151
- Blasphemous — $108,018
Run lengths. 139 games, 180+ runners. Longest: Final Fantasy VIII on PS2 at 9h 10m. Shortest: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle on NES at 4m 48s.
Consoles. Almost a third of games were PC, followed by SNES and NES. A few genuinely old hardware runs — TurboGrafx-16 and MegaDrive showed up too.
Correlations. Tested run length vs. money raised — no relationship.
Tested console platform vs. money raised — also no relationship.
At some point you just have to accept that fundraising at GDQ is a form of art.
Donor comments. 36,573 comments, 681,146 words, 28,115 unique. The word cloud was dominated by well-wishes, but two things stood out — a lot of honking (Untitled Goose Game had just come out), and plenty of "edf edf" from Earth Defense Force fans doing their thing.
Dedications. I scanned comments for keywords tied to family members and relations. Most donations were dedicated to friends (472), followed by mothers (241), brothers (163), fathers (162), and grandmothers (149). A charity speedrunning marathon full of people donating in memory of someone.
stack
Python, requests, BeautifulSoup, pandas, matplotlib, wordcloud. ThreadPoolExecutor for concurrent scraping.
reflection
A one-day analysis that took two days to scrape. The finding that neither run length nor console correlated with donations was genuinely surprising — I'd expected longer runs or nostalgia-heavy platforms to pull more. They don't.
The writeup was featured on UpLevel's blog and got some Reddit attention. A user flagged a few mistakes, which I corrected. That's the correct order of events.
Source code on GitHub.