Were the votes ironic?
The player-voted Steam Awards have reached their conclusion, and the results are aboutas weird as the nominees. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the weirdest game possible won in several categories, such asRed Dead Redemption 2for the Labor Of Love award andStarfieldfor “Most Innovative Gameplay”.
There’s a thing that can happen when video game awards are led by votes, whether by the public or even by a small team of journalists: you end up rewarding the good games that everyone played rather than the masterpieces played by only a few. The games that everyone played are inevitably the blockbusters, and your awards can therefore quickly skew towards reocgnising successful marketing campaigns rather than actual video game quality.
There are ways to control for this, particularly if you’re a small team of journalists (hi). I’d guess that Valve, in some way, have tried to control for it via the categories they’ve selected, which attempt to set a more specific criteria than just “I’ve played this, it’s good” for the people casting votes. On this evidence, it hasn’t worked, and voters have jammed the big game they’ve played into holes that don’t seem a natural fit.
To be clear: I don’t hate Red Dead 2 or Starfield, but they’re obviously poor fits for the categories they’ve won.
Thefull list of victorsdoes contain some more reasonable results.Lethal Companywon the “Better With Friends award”, which probably reflects some recency bias but is at least a genuine co-op sensation.Baldur’s Gate 3won Game Of The Year and Outstanding Story-Rich Game, and there is genuine consensus that it’s great.
I assume the Steam Awards will be viewed by a huge number of Steam players and so it’s a shame it isn’t used to highlight more deserving winners across all its categories. On the other hand, I suppose as democratic awards, it’s not only Steam players who miss out, but who are to blame.
