I haven't played Starfield myself, but from my understanding the gameplay is: Skyrim in space. Which to me, is "Most recycled gameplay"

These awards are community-voted, so I imagine, Starfield was either a very funny joke or a bot army...

Remember that Stray (the game where you can meow and jump) won most innovative gameplay last year. The Steam Awards is purely a popularity contest, people just vote for the game they played for the badge.

Yeah that's Onion levels of satire. That's like the one award it would, if anything get the opposite off.

Yeah. It's weird, almost all of these have some level of controversy. Starfield. Hogwarts Legacy and Rowling's transphobia controversies. There were attempted boycotts of Atomic Heart by Ukraine sympathizers for a variety of alleged reasons. Some lifelong fans of The Last of Us were reneging of the franchise after learning that its creator Neil Druckmann was inspired by Israel-Palestina to create TLOU and recently posted an Israel flag in his Instagram. There was controversy about Dave the Diver being considered an indie game by most casual people (and being nominated as such for awards) and further discussion about what's an indie. SIFU was criticized by journalists for negative portrayal of a foreign culture and briefly became a bit of a darling for online right-wingers that hate video game journalists. Even Baldur's Gate 3 was milked a bit as a darling by people that generally dislike current video game devs and accuse them of being lazy. I also even saw someone using solo-developed Lethal Company as a bludgeon against other developers. Only ones I don't remember seeing controversies about are Labyrinthine and Red Dead Redemption 2.

It almost feels like the classic coordinated troll-voting campaign by 4chan or whatever but those tend to have a right-wing bend and I don't know if they would've voted for Atomic Heart (I don't know if the would have voted BG3 either but I assume that one's kinda unstoppable). It's kind of weird because a couple years ago when Trump was praising Russia right-wing gamers might have voted for the Russia game to piss off liberals. But with the current wars there's a lot of right-wingers supporting Ukraine and Israel. So I don't know.

Some of these category winners are starting to make less and less sense each year. Red Dead 2 for Labor of Love? wtf?

I voted for Risk of Rain Returns for best on Steam Deck. Been playing it on the ROG Ally and it's a damn near perfect handheld game.

Nah, I didn't play Hogwarts but the deck can run Armored Core buttery smooth

As long as it isn't starfield then you probably aren't out of touch.

well, it did start a whole new p0rn fad, so...

I’m not too upset about that. The game looks great visually and graphically.