The Steam Awards winners have been revealed and they are boring

The banality of crowds

The problem with publicly voted video game awards is that a straight popularity contest overwhelmingly favours games with large marketing budgets and online communities. That’s why there are few surprises among the winners of this year’s Steam Awards, which were announced today.

Here’s the complete list of winners:

I mean, IloveDeath Stranding, but the “on the go” category was added in respect of the Steam Deck’s launch. Is Death Stranding reallythe best “on the go” game for the Steam Deck, or is it just a good game that folks have heard of and popular Twitter accounts promoted the vote?

Of course, publicly-voted awards can also produce more interesting results if you only polla small, specific, weirdo portion of the public.