Once again, people look towards Valve’s own Steam Awards, a user voted celebration what what’s supposed to be the best games in their respective categories throughout the year but more often than not people simply take the chance to vote for the first few games they’re prompted in whichever category to simply earn Steam cards, stickers, XP or whatever Gabe Newell decides to give his paying customers.
And this year is an absolute steamer, Red Dead Redemption 2, the game of which its Online component has been completely abandoned by Rockstar Games so that more developmental focus (and profits) can be made with GTA Online instead, has received the coveted “Labor of Love” Award this year.
Zero major updates, its online component has been entirely abandoned, winning the Labor of Love award, probably due to the immense hype sheeple have in regards to Grand Theft Auto 6.
So you could probably chock this award up to being a pittance by the community because Rockstar Games used to be amazing well over a decade ago and now they spend their time interjecting feministic agendas and ideals into their games and yet they still receive as much praise if not greater now despite offering far weaker story narratives.
Red Dead Redemption 2 won out over the likes of Rust, Dota 2, Deep Rock Galactic and Apex Legends, just about every single finalist in this category doesn’t deserve jack shit. What with Dota 2 effectively being a dead game, Apex Legends being just as bland and uninspiring now as it did on launch, only with a few additional measures in pro-woke LGBT character design and the ability to get banned for saying “shut the fuck up”.
Rust has an entire focus on producing more gimmick bullshit updates for its community over actual quality of life fixtures, so it’s out and when it comes to Deep Rock Galactic it would’ve been my ideal choice, the previous year considering how its developers are more focused on branching out its golden goose with a roguelike spinoff absolutely nobody asked for.
The result of which has essentially downplayed the importance in seasonal updates for Deep Rock Galactic that will now have to wait until June 2024 before anything major comes, which is just a prelude to their roguelike game anyway. Season 6 won’t be coming until sometime the following year in 2025.
And that’s just the start of the problems seen throughout last year’s Awards, of which if you were gracious enough to spare the ten seconds it takes to vote for whichever game you’re prompted, you can earn 11 animated stickers.
Honestly, if you thought a dead game being a labor of love wasn’t ironic enough, Starfield also won the Steam award for Most Innovative Gameplay, which is absolutely hilarious considering how from the perspective of even a hardcore Bethesda fan,
Starfield ultimately demolishes the only caveat Bethesda were incorporating to hold their games together. The complete lack of an actual open world, we can probably harp on all day about how the dungeon designs inside of Skyrim are immensely repetitive, it’s really the open world that compiles and salvages the weaker points of a Bethesda title, Fallout 4’s horrible story aside.
Starfield offers absolutely nothing new or exciting, the main story is pretty horrible, the open world is replaced by traversing the galaxy of the exact same pre-generated lab facilities. If you’ve played a modern Fallout title or Elder Scrolls you’ve practically played Starfield with a glossy new HD textured filter, the only general enhancement or innovation made was somehow managing to incorporate a fluid gunplay system on a game engine that’s over twenty years old and is in dire need of replacing.
And of course majority of the game had been outsourced throughout its development, including but not limited to devoted employees hilariously responding to negative criticism resulting in the game being rated lower and lower as time progressed, with no creation kit released the game currently sits at an overall mixed score of 64% on Steam.
It won out over various games I’ve never heard of and Remnant 2 which runs like absolute garbage on PC, though I must give it credit it was certainly a visual spectacle in many areas, however the core gameplay loop is really just Dark Souls but with guns. I wouldn’t really call it innovative in the slightest, other than it being a fairly decent experience from a lower grade and more obscure studio.
Would it be a fair assessment to assume that the results are rubbish simply because the votes were rubbish to begin with anyway? Almost as if people didn’t care or spend any time actually selecting their preferred choice simply because they wanted some fancy animated stickers or Steam cards as received years prior.
A vote that was however not shit for once was the Better With Friends category, of which Lethal Company won out over Warhammer 40K: Darktide.
Honestly, either of those two games winning would be absolutely deserving though I imagine Lethal Company won out in the end simply due to it’s heightened popularity compared to Darktide which saw a massive resurgence in players in October from around 4,000 to 30,000 players, however it has somewhat cooled off but maintained momentum with daily peaks at over 12,000.
Lethal Company has been the indie sensation that continues to give even after a couple of months out in the field, with the game regularly and consistently achieving over 100,000 concurrent players since the middle of November, either of the two would be the ideal selection but I’d probably have to give it to Lethal Company simply based on its immensely greater player count and reception.
Comrades will be honored to see Atomic Heart win an award, for Outstanding Visual Style which makes barely little sense, the game is just another generic first-person-shooter reminiscent of Bioshock, but obviously the story took a lower priority over its graphical fidelity though if we’re being honest the only real reason this game is even remembered after its release was simply due to the failed boycott it received by Twitter folks over the Russia and Ukraine conflict.
It looks nice, but it certainly isn’t outstanding over other titles that purposefully attempted a unique and visually stunning art direction, the story however is a joke that detracts from the actual gaming experience it’s that terrible.
I also cannot help but remember the time its developers defended its incorporation of cancerous DENUVO DRM by simply stating use NVIDIA’s regressive DLSS upscaling technologies to recoup performance.
SIFU won the best game you suck at award, over games such as Overwatch 2, Street Fighter 6 and fucking EA Sports FC 24.
This is a deserving award given how the game is basically a hilarious mod factory. The game itself was under the microscope by failed Journalists over alleged cultural appropriation by failing to consult real Chinese people about Kung-Fu, tis a pity that the world lost Bruce Lee at such a young age.
Another dogshit award has to be Steam’s Best Soundtrack award, which went to The Last of Us Part 1. You know, the remake to a game released a decade ago.
Such asinine bullshit won out in the end over the likes of Pizza Tower and Hi-Fi Rush.
Dave the Diver won the “Sit Back and Relax” award, over the likes of Cities Skylines 2 which is a broken and unoptimized mess, Potion Craft, Coral Island and Train Sim World 4.
Needless to say, Dave deserved it.
And finally onto the last two awards that anyone really cares about, that being the Outstanding Story-Rich Game award, Baldur’s Gate 3 with its immensely progressive nature won out in the end over the likes of Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 Remake that detracts from the original and Lies of P.
Oh yeah, and a game called “Love is All Around” managed to be featured on the list, which is more or less a real-life romantic dating simulator of which I’d rather play over the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Baldur’s Gate 3 with no general surprise also swept Steam’s Game of the Year award, over Lethal Company, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4 and EA Sports FC 24 for whatever fucking reason retards continually purchase annual sports releases.
Previous years entries have always been barbaric, with Steam’s 2022 awards featuring Cyberpunk 2077 as the Labor of Love winner, while 2021 featured Forza Horizon 5 as the “Outstanding Visual Style” winner.
An open world racing title featuring real life cars, over the likes of Subnautica, Bright Memory Infinite and Psychonauts 2, each with their own distinct art styles, losing out to a basic racing game that hasn’t innovated since the original Horizon.
That’s fine, because Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a Square Enix game that failed to meet financial expectations won Best Soundtrack.
And in 2020, Death Stranding won Most Innovative Gameplay, a game that consists of nothing but walking, the Steam Awards have always seemed half-arsed and a joke. Simply because majority of those casting their nominations simply do so for the sake of receiving incentive rewards for free account XP.
In what has to be a shock to absolutely nobody, that particular trend continued into 2023 which majority of the Steam Award winners undeserving of their placements.
