Even Starfield fans can't fathom why it won most innovative gameplay in 2023's Steam awards

RDR2 was nominated for "labor of love", a five year old sp game with an abandoned online component and no significant updates or dlc since release

I'd vote for Project Zomboid but that wasn't even nominated. Steam Awards are just a joke / popularity contest.
Meanwhile Deep Rock Galactic gets multiple new events per year and has a super community focused dev team.
- DRG already won on a previous year, I think. Steam rules are that a game can't be renominated for a category they already won.
  
  Kind of an odd rule. I suppose if it didn't exist, Terraria would just win that category every year.

That's why it's stupid to give incentives to people to vote. I hadn't even heard of 90% of the games up for selection in the awards. But I sure as hell voted on every one, usually just picking a game I'd heard the name of, or one with a cool looking banner.

This right here is the exact reason Starfield won most innovative, and the same reason Hogwarts Legacy won best on Steam Deck. People who hadn't played any of the games in the votes only voted on games they had heard of.
- It was weird voting for a best on steam deck without owning a steam deck. Seems like it would have been easy to restrict that one to accounts that have been used on a deck. Same with the VR game vote
- I just assume it's based on who pays more and votes don't even matter. Even if the votes matter, then awards never mattered unless I'm getting something out of it

Steam awards is just popular vote and memes, why did last of us get best soundtrack? Why did rdr2 get labor of love? Why did hogwarts win best on steam deck? Dont take awards seriously, they are just a bit of fun.

We were supposed to vote?
I voted for all those games lmao
I mean RDR2 certain looked like a labor of love
- Maybe 5 years ago when it was released... What labor did they do on it this year?
- The award is meant for great continued development, content support and updates. But I can see the confusion from the award title if you don't read the description.

Honestly, the whole user/community aspect of Steam is garbage. Discussion forums are just back and forth fights between people about random things like game issues without anyone trying to solve the actual issue. The screenshots/art whatever section is just softcore porn of the game characters and the main screenshots/art section that covers all games is just a hub for wallpaper engine crap.

The guides section is the worst. Its all just stupid meme shit like "How to start the game" or "how to walk forward".

The workshop section CAN be decent but posters just select all tags for their items so searching by category is useless and there is no rule enforcement to prevent that.

I've been a steam user since the start and have a steam deck. Their linux support is really good but thats it.

Oh and trolls and bullies commenting on your profile just don't seem to ever get banned nomatter what horrific shit they post.

I think this varies. Different games, different communities.
Oh and trolls and bullies commenting on your profile just don't seem to ever get banned nomatter what horrific shit they post.

They certainly do if you report them. Losing your community privileges, including the right to change your avatar, is something Valve does to people who violate the community rules. But there is no automatic system. You need to report them.

As for the rest: It's a video game store. Think about how many of the users are children. It's why there are curators and ratings for damn near every submission. They used to even have ratings for the forum topics back before they were integrated into Steam directly; they probably should bring that back.

Because a significant portion of people like doing things on the internet in the most inappropriate way possible, in this case voting for the choices that make the least sense for any given category.

many aren't old enough to understand "innovative" means simply because they lack the reference material, history of said genre, etc. And yes, trolling is probably a reason like review bombing.

I hate how there's a pretty glaring typo in the article, and no way to inform the author without setting up an entire account with this website specifically. I get that anonymous comments suck, but I can't even help point out something without a 12 step process.

TL;DR - "But, I think we can all agree, it was exactly anything revolutionary. " should be "wasn't".

The YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAH guy (you know who I'm talking about) has been busy making fake accounts for votes.

I'd figured it was that disconnected dev who threw a hissy fit on the general public... or Todd
- Wasn't Bethesda individually responding to/disputing negative Steam reviews? Obviously someone's got a lot of time on their hands over there, wouldn't put it past them to spend a bunch of time manipulating this vote too.
I do not know who you are talking about.
- There was a guy in the audience of some conference or award show (I think E3 2019 but not sure) who went absolutely fucking wild every time ~~Todd~~ anyone from Bethesda opened their mouth.
  
  Found the clip! It was E3 2019.
- Kool Aid man?
I have no idea who you're talking about...

It's easy, it's the Internet and it's full of trolls.

Right? The community reaction will be a riot if Bethesda tries to use the award in advertisements.

Of course a better question is why it was even nominated in the first place...
- Steam users are doing the nominations as well.

Starfield is innovated in that it took me almost 18 hours of on and off game play over a couple months before I was actually interested in it enough to actually think about it. By that point I would have normally just tossed it over to the mothball drive and never thought about it again

Same, but I also I spent an additional week obsessively installing and trying different mods, until I finally came to the conclusion that none of them would actually make the game fun to play.
- With no creation kit, the mods are super limited. I'm guessing once that releases, there will be a lot more options that might make it worth a replay. I'd like to see something that makes building outposts worthwhile, and maybe some companions that aren't all the same personality. That said, if I ever do replay it, it'll be in a few years. It wasn't interesting enough to want to jump right back in.
How'd you end up putting 18 hours in in the first place without being interested?
- I have played all the bethesda games since Morrowind (I even beat that!) except Fallout 76 or whatever it was called. I figured it had to have something going for it. I would play for an hour here and there and just be like meh. I am still kinda meh on it but at least I have some understanding of the path the main story wants to drive me in now... It's a shit story but I figured I will do the main story and see how I feel about the game. As it is, the main story is barely enough to keep me coming back. Also my friend spoiled a major plot point for me and I want to see how that comes about (main character death or something haha)

The real question is; why was starfield an option to begin with? Same with RDR2, who comes up with the "ballots"?

They are based on user submitted nominations that happened during the prior sale.

Valve can be pretty lazy about this kind of thing. So I wouldn't be surprised if they just automatically used the top most nominated in each category without even a tiny bit of vetting.

It's just trolling like any other thing where people can vote

Dammit, Beth paid for their award, so they'll get one, even if the category we need to squeeze it in is most innovative gameplay!

Award shows are like political polls. They don't mean shit!

The right grease on the right palms.

If you can send Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska...

People on the Internet will vote for all kinds of stupid nonsense. At least the Alaska visit was funny.

It was the new lock picking mini game.

Trolls attempting to dilute the impact of bg3 getting goty. Easy to manipulate those lesser categories filled with indie games.

Who would care? BG3 winning GOTY was the most predictable thing ever.

It was slightly innovative to have buildable starships, wasnt it? Probably enough that the average steam voter went 🤯.

You think it's the first game with buildable starships? That's been a whole GENRE of games for like 15 years now.
- More than 20. Eve came out in 2003.
- Yeah, but how many of them are good?
  
  Like kerbal space program is AWESOME.
  
  Space Engineers was... blocky.
Slightly. It was basically "modular base with wings!" It was nice, but even that got complaints about how tedious it was to build ships, IIRC.
Should've added the /s at the end, my dude. Sarcasm detectors don't work on Internet text.

Also, after reading your comment I immediately thought of the gummy block ships from Kingdom Hearts and lol'd at myself.
- Yeah. But the part about average steam voter being easily impressed wasnt sarcasm.