Why The Steam Awards doesn't mean anything for video games except being a popularity contest

The winners of the 2021 Steam Awards were announced recently. The first Steam Awards took place in 2016, after which it has been an annual tradition for the storefront.

Steam is the largest PC gaming storefront by far, and the nominations and voting are all done by the vast ocean of Steam users.

For some context, Steam had 120 million active users as of September 2020, with the platform’s peak concurrent user count nearing 27 million on several occasions. Resultingly, The Steam Awards is a great opportunity for any game developer or publisher to grab eyeballs for their products.

With the nomination and voting process all being done by users, The Steam Awards inherently inculcates the standout feature of representational democracy, if one were to draw a comparison from real world politics. Then where’s the catch? Why is The Steam Awards touted by a significant portion of gamers as meaningless?

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The flaws in The Steam Awards’ nomination and voting process

The nomination process for The Steam Awards takes place each year over the duration of the Steam Autumn Sale, where users can nominate their choice of games across the different categories. Herein lies one of the biggest flaws in the system - if a user nominates a game for a certain category, they can’t nominate it in any other.

It’s fairly simple to understand that ideally, a game can have, say, both the best story and the best soundtrack while being a strong contender for the Game of the Year. But, as users are only permitted to nominate a game in a single category, it results in an inadvertent vote split, which is not totally representative of the steam userbase’s opinion of a particular game.

Then comes the predicament of any public voting system that can be traced back to the times of ancient Greece - the Steam Awards being a popularity contest, AAA titles with large marketing budgets easily triumph over smaller fish.

Needless to say, The Steam Awards was never meant to be in the same vein as the BAFTA Games or the DICE Awards, and will always be a popularity contest. However, Valve can introduce ranked-choice voting at the Steam Awards and make it a tad bit fairer.

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Community reacts to the winners of The 2021 Steam Awards

The most baffling winner among the different categories at this year's Steam Awards is surely Forza Horizon 5 for 'Outstanding Visual Style.' While the title features stellar photorealism, crowning it as the winner does a disservice to all the other games that actually have a "distinctive look and feel that suffuses an entire game."

The community has long felt that The Steam Awards is more of a popularity contest than one that takes a deep dive into the games that truly deserve the win. While the situation, and the user feedback, hasn't changed yet, maybe next time's process will be a bit fairer for all the games that are involved.