I think a problem is that people are compelled to vote on every catagory to get that sweet, sweet useless gift. Making them vote for the only name they have played and/or heard of in every catagory.
There’s this, and there’s just trolling, like giving most innovative gameplay to Starfield. The internet’s gonna internet, what can you do.
At least the trolls make it obvious they’re not voting sincerely. Steam awards are a popularity contest where the categories don’t really matter, so I’m just glad less people will take the results seriously this time around.
I don’t think there’s really any trolling going on (at least enough that it matters), just that people vote for what they know or recognize, like you said a popularity contest. Three of the titles in the Innovative Gameplay section are pretty niche, no matter how good they are. Even Remnant 2 is dwarfed by Starfield sales, so the latter just becomes the default choice for most people.
If there was any other big name AAA title on the list, I think Starfield could have lost.
The issue starts even earlier, with the fact that you’re encouraged to nominate games that you may not have even played. I think the only game released this year that I’ve played was Cities: Skylines 2, which I didn’t feel deserved anything, so I just punched in whatever games I could find that had released this year.
And then, yeah, I totally just clicked choices for all the votes for awards too. I didn’t really care, I didn’t play any of the choices anyway.
I did the exact same thing.
This year you could skip a category, and it would still count towards the badge / stickers / whatever, but I don’t think that was made clear at a glance. It was explained in the FAQ, but who reads that, when you could just click whatever and be done?
Maybe that was just for the nominations though, I don’t remember checking for the actual vote.
It is crazy how Steam users seem to interact with the platform exclusively in bad faith. The reviews are filled with memes, joke reviews and drama. You will lose IQ points just by opening the forums. And of course, people troll the awards. Not that I would expect a mainstream gaming platform to attract geniuses, but Steam community is definitely bottom of the barrel.
What platforms have you been frequenting (or avoiding) where steam is the bottom of the barrel?
Honestly, steam reviews are far more useful than most review systems. Ign or metacritic are nearly useless in comparison.
I knew this year’s awards were a joke the second I saw Starfield nominated for (and subsequently winning) ‘most innovative gameplay.’
I feels like this sort of article pops up every single year after Steam Award. I remember the first year steam award started it’s basically the same “issue”, where game that people think don’t deserve the award are given one.
At this point the steam awards is just advertising. We don’t have proof of voting bots because Valve exclusively keeps things in secret.
When a single journo phones in an award it’s called fucking up, when it’s an entire community it’s a meme.
