Introduction

Moving away from the technical discussions and articles for a bit, I wanted to touch base on some gaming news. Towards the end of 2023, Steam unveiled their winter sale along with opening up voting for the Steam Game Awards for 2023. Everyone was excited about this, hoping it would get rid of the bad taste left behind by the Video Game Awards that happened earlier in the month. I usually enjoy this as it’s cool to see what has been nominated and what people have been enjoying. It’s especially useful during a sale period if you’re looking for something new to buy on the cheap.

This year however I found the nominations a bit strange. Some games felt out of place for their particular categories and others simply felt too old to really feature in the 2023 awards. I decided to wait until the voting was in to see if the winners made more sense and for the most part, they did:

There were a couple that made me raise an eyebrow, however.

Labor of Love - Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on PC in 2019 (2018 for Playstation). It has not seen updates or additional content in years and the online portion is supposedly overrun with modders and hackers. I know this game is loved and it’s great but it’s hard to take the award seriously when it shared the category with games like Apex Legends, Deeprock Galactic, Dota 2, and Rust - all of which have seen big updates and new content in 2023.

Most Innovative Gameplay - Starfield

We were all there, and we saw how quickly Starfield fell from its cloud and crashed into the ground below. Perhaps the innovation referred to here is Bethesda’s attempt to gaslight detractors into believing that they were in fact enjoying the game. It could be that Starfield deserves this and I am just upset at how the game has launched and progressed to be as disappointing as it was.

We can also talk about early-access games like Lethal Company winning the Better With Friends award. I have played, and enjoyed, Lethal Company and the award is deserved but it is an early-access game that relies quite a bit on mods. Regardless, it’s good fun and I recommend picking it up. It’s dirt cheap after all.

Conclusion

I can shout at the clouds as much as I want, but it really boils down to the system needing some tweaking. Steam offers rewards for voting and even if they didn’t people would want to vote for games they’ve loved, whether from 2023 or 2019. Scrolling through the categories it’s easy to look at all the games in the category and think “I don’t know any of these except for …” and subsequently vote for that exception, regardless of the category, there’s no abstain option in any case.

This way, any unhappiness can be countered by the fact that that’s what the majority voted for.

My recommendation? Have the community vote to nominate games for categories but also allow them to abstain if they feel the category falls outside their usual gameplay (not everyone owns a Deck and not everyone enjoys multiplayer games). Have some criteria for which games can be voted on (Labour of Love should probably have seen some updates in the past year, as an example). Once you have the nominations for each category, hand it over to a panel of seasoned journalists to vote on the winners.

Who knows, maybe we can all work together on improving the system going forward?