SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 28 — Coinciding with the Steam Fall Sale, nominations are now being accepted from the PC gaming service’s 90 million users ahead of Awards voting at the end of the year.
Steam’s 90 million-plus users can select potential Steam Award finalists over the course of 2019’s Fall Sale, which runs November 26 to December 3.
While previous iterations of the Steam Awards let users pick current favourites regardless of release date, the majority of 2019’s nominees must be selected from games released over the course of the last year.
Consistent with prior Awards processes, users can only nominate a game once across all eight categories.
This prevents them from stuffing categories with a single title and prompts them to consider the specific merits of a would-be shortlistee.
Not being able to place an overall Game of the Year nominee in the running for a supporting category could encourage participants to surface less obvious choices: top-rated small studio hits such as Slay the Spire, Disco Elysium, Risk of Rain 2 and Horace, for example.
Other categories encompass the Better With Friends Award, Most Innovative Gameplay, Outstanding Story-Rich Game, Outstanding Visual Style, Best Game You Suck At and VR Game of the Year.
According to October’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey, some 42% or every two in five Steam users have English set as their preferred language, with Chinese language options running at 18% or nearly one in five, and Russian-speaking users notching 12% of the overall userbase.
That provides an opportunity for games with significant regional popularity to end up as Steam Award contenders in the second half of December.
One drawback of the current format is that users are encouraged to nominate in every single category, regardless of whether they have direct experience.
This is especially true of the Virtual Reality award, with the Steam Hardware Survey disclosing that only 1.03% of users own a compatible VR headset.
This year, perhaps more than any other, is also marked by notable absences from the available pool of candidates, thanks to the rise of the Epic Games Store and its catalogue of timed exclusives.
As a result, there’s no place for Borderlands 3, The Outer Worlds, Red Dead Redemption 2, or even the breakout Untitled Goose Game at the 2019 Steam Awards, though 2020 may provide a second chance. — AFP-Relaxnews
