The Steam Awards Nominations Are Open, So Get Ready for the World's Biggest Popularity Contest
It is time to perform your civic duty, earn a shiny digital badge, and inevitably watch a game you hate win "Labor of Love."
The Steam Awards are back. From now until December 1st at 10 AM Pacific, you can head over to the Steam store and nominate your favorite games across 11 different categories.
It is a chaotic, democratized system where the players decide everything. In theory, this is beautiful. In practice, it usually means the game with the most active player base sweeps the board, regardless of quality.
But hey, we can still try to get some indie darlings on the list, right?
The Categories and The Rules
Most of the categories are standard fare: Game of the Year, VR Game of the Year, Best Soundtrack, and Outstanding Visual Style.
The rules are simple. For everything except "Labor of Love," you can only nominate games released on Steam after last year's Autumn Sale. This keeps the list fresh.
The Labor of Love category is the interesting one. This is for older games that are still getting updates. Valve has thankfully added a rule excluding previous winners like Warframe, GTA V, Terraria, and Red Dead Redemption 2. (The last one especially being a complete joke for this category)
This means we might actually see a new winner this year instead of Rockstar taking home a trophy for doing the bare minimum on an eight-year-old game.
The Badge Hustle
Let's be honest, 50% of us are only doing this for the XP.
Valve has rolled out the Steam Awards Nomination Committee Badge. It has four levels, giving you 25 XP each. To max it out, you need to:
Nominate at least one game.
Nominate a game in each category.
Play a game you've nominated.
Review (or update a review for) a game you've nominated.
It is a blatant engagement trap, and I fall for it every single year. I will absolutely boot up a game for five seconds just to tick that box.
Please, Vote With Your Brain
The finalists will be revealed and voted on during the Winter Sale, with winners announced on January 3rd.
My request to you is simple: try to vote for the games that actually deserve it. It is very easy to just click Call of Duty or Black Myth: Wukong for everything because those are the names you know.
But this is a chance to highlight the indie darlings. Don't let this just be another popularity contest where the loudest marketing campaign wins.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go decide if Arc Raiders counts as "Relaxing" or "Game You Suck At."
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