The people have spoken and they have said… pretty much what you expect. The Steam Awards Results (opens in new tab) are in, and the final tally of the voting process in December didn’t hold many surprises. Elden Ring won the main Game of the Year trophy (hey, good choice (opens in new tab)), and the other ten awards went to a thoroughly non-shocking series of games, with one possible exception. Here are those results in full:
- Game of the Year: Elder ring
- VR Game of the Year: hitman 3
- labor of love: Cyberpunk 2077
- Better with friends: Rapid
- Excellent visual style: Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Most Innovative Gameplay: Strayed
- Best game you’re bad at: Elder ring
- Best Soundtrack: Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
- Excellent story rich game: God of war
- Sit back and relax: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
- Best game on the go: Death Stranding Director’s Cut
Those are certainly some good games with big budgets and a lot of name recognition. It’s hard to go wrong, almost each fits its category like a foot in a worn shoe. Hitman 3 is a great VR game (opens in new tab), YouTuber favorite Raft is a fun time with friends, and Stray turns you into a cat, which I’ve never been before, ergo, it’s innovative. QED. However, it’s interesting to see Cyberpunk 2077 take the Labor of Love award, suggesting that players are at least happy with how CDPR has handled the game since its botched 2020 launch.
While I’m furious that Final Fantasy took home the soundtrack award instead of Persona 5, Death Stranding is the only truly weird result. Kojima’s Post-Apocalyptic Mailman Sim reportedly runs well on the Steam Deck (opens in new tab), but it chews through your battery on high settings and doesn’t really seem like the kind of game I’d pull out while waiting in a departure lounge. I would have thought Vampire Survivors would be a more suitable choice for on-the-go gaming, but I suppose I miss the wisdom of Steam’s voting masses. Death stranding is fairly good (opens in new tab) no matter where you play it, after all.
Giving people incentives to vote – in the form of Steam trading cards worth valuable pennies – even if they’re not actually invested in the outcome, seems to have mainly produced a list of ‘Games people have heard of’, which is a bit is disappointing. I would like to propose a new system for the following awards: Game of the Year—sorting (opens in new tab) Edition, in which the winner of each category is chosen by Gabe Newell throwing one of his many knives at a dartboard full of Steam game names. That is real democracy.