I want to believe people just like stupid jokes, but your last sentence might be right. Lots of gamers don't care about quality just want to play the latest popular titles.

There are so many negative SF reviews with dozens of hours of playtime. These people already gave their money and game stats to Bethesda so what's the point of whining?

As long as people preorder and buy stuff because of the FOMO effect the AAA industry will not improve.

It' even dumber than that, imo. People just click random known games for the steam awards, because no one cares and they just want their rewards.

the reality is that the majority of gamers does not give a single fuck about quality and innovation the awards and just wants to play the next FIFA EA FC, CoD and Bugthesda get the rewards for voting and picks random games or maybe ones they've heard the names of.

I hadn't even heard of most of the games up for vote, let alone actually played them, so I just randomly picked cool-looking banners or names. I think a lot of people are like me and just picked the couple games they'd actually heard of before.

Yeah it’s really soul crushing to see starfield win most innovative gameplay. One less incentive for real innovative gameplay to be made.

I think people just love to troll so they nominated Starfield. Then figured it would be really funny if SF won.

Worse. They force everyone to vote in every category, without a skip or no opinion option. This means, when each category is presented to the user, they basically pick the only game on the list they're familiar with, regardless of evaluating on merit. If they had something as simple as "I am not familiar enough to vote on this topic" as an option, then RDR2 drops off.

Steam gives you rewards for voting in every category and lets you vote for games you haven't played sometimes on systems you don't own (VR and Steam Deck categories).

Of course the results are shit.

You mean for the actual vote? Because you could nominate any game, no matter if you played it or even bought it on Steam, and the Top 5 nominations in each category made it to the final vote.

They do though. Aside from the award names and the award descriptions (which function as prompts) the awards are player driven entirely. The nominees are chosen during the player nomination phase, then during the finals players choose from the most nominated. I believe there needs to be some critical curation but currently it's entirely chosen by Steam's players.