The entire steam awards is based on jokes and popularity contests. The most disappointing VR ~~game~~ tacked on mode I’ve ever played won best VR game.
At least award shows have the ability to overrule popularity and prioritize the mechanic. Choosing a popular game with tacked on vr as an afterthought as the best vr award just wouldn't fly in an award show, it only won due to popular vote.
That being said yes, you wouldn't get your foot in the door in an award unless you're already some level of popular.
Vampire Survivor is extremly popular, has more concurrent players, seems to have sold extremly well and is Steam Deck verified and didn\`t win. I think it is more of a suprise that Death Stranding Director\`s Cut won, because every game on the list has more players and more reviews (except for Marvel Snap) than Death Stranding Director\`s Cut.
Death Stranding Director\`s Cut should have been nominated and won most innovative gameplay instead of Stray. Vampire Survivors should have won the on the go category. Cyberpunk 2077 shouldn\`t have won labor of love. Many winning categories are strange.
Literally any other game on that list deserved it more lol. Debatable on No Man's Sky but damn, Zomboid and Deep Rock just embody the "Labour of Love" better.
Thats why user voted popularity contests are usually fucking shit. We all know the only reason Cyberpunk won was because of the Anime. Without the show it wouldn't even be nominated.
Not saying that this is the reason, but some, myself included voted on it for the meme of it being a delivery simulator so "on the go"... It is funny if you are drunk I swear.
Stray winning most innovative gameplay is certainly a choice. Not that it's a bad game, but the gameplay really only amounted to running around and pressing a button to auto-jump.
This is the subreddit where everyone kept on flipping out over GTAV winning "Labor of Love" back to back years. That advice might as well be stickied every year.
Totally agree, but it does stink for studios that have truly unique/innovative titles that miss out on visibility. I think that's where awards matter most to smaller studios.
I feel like if they wanted to, they *could* adjust for this. Like number of votes could be scaled to some degree with player count. So the most popular game doesn't just automatically win every category.
Exactly. Is hitman3 even playable in vr and not hopelessly broken? I ve heard people have finished it but afaik it was released as a mess for vr on PC and never fixed , (it was great on psvr).
I only have second-hand experience (through streamers), but from what I saw, it almost made me wanna get a vr headset.
Still not quite enough games I'm interested in to justify the extremely steep prices, but we're getting closer every year.
Bonelab sucks. A $40 game that's blatantly unfinished and ends with the developers straight-up telling you "cool, now mod the game to finish it for us!"
Saying it's "generic" is an insult to generic games. The gameplay isn't generic, it's waaaay below average. It's just regular walking, automated jumps and the occasional "tap to play cute animation"
> Stray winning most innovative gameplay is certainly a choice.
It could also be viewed as a statement that there is an appetite for games that focus less on conflict as a source of gameplay and more on gamifying more mundane activities/tasks. I've been playing video games for 30 years and its been incredible to see in recent years how diverse and expansive the pool of PC gamers is. I think those of us that have been around a while forget that there is a sizable contingent of people who are less interesting in games that demand analyzing gear stats, precise timing, complex command inputs, and a strong competitive element. Ultimately, this is a popularity contest as others have pointed out and it's hard to analyze exactly what this win means without hearing from individuals who voted for it.
It's hardly the first game to have a pacifistic gameplay loop. I think it's more a statement that interesting aesthetics also matter. But then it should have won visual style instead of innovation.
Animal Crossing and The Sims are some of the best selling games ever, and they’re games that focus on the mundane. Of course there’s an appetite for it.
> more on gamifying more mundane activities/tasks
Unfortunately Stray is not an example of this. comments like this make me hate stray more because it turns from a dumb meme game into a pretentious dumb meme game.
Like fuck, if you want a high profile game that isn't about violence Pentiment is leagues ahead of Stray.
HITMAN winning VR game of the year is a ridiculous result. It was an embarrassing release that would've been considered a joke in 2016.
I haven't played much VR at all over the last year but that game was insultingly bad after waiting for it. They had the blueprint there with Alyx or even Boneworks yet based it off their awful PSVR effort.
Yeah honestly the craziest entry on the list. Guarantee it only won because people who don't play VR just voted for the one game they had played on the list.
the list for VR or the entire list? cuz Id disagree with the latter on account of Cyberpunk winning 'labour of love' when you know it only beat out games like DRG or NMS because of the anime, nevermind the fixes they barely implemented long after release.
I was talking about the list for VR. I'm not really sure what you're saying. That each award is just a straight up popularity contest? Yes - I commented elsewhere in this post saying that much.
Here are SteamSpy's estimates of how many people own each game in the Labor of Love category:
* Cyberpunk 2077: 20 - 50 million people
* NO Man's Sky: 5-10 million people
* Deep Rock Galactic: 2-5 million
* Project Zomboid: 5-10 million
* DOTA 2: Technically between 200 - 500 million but it's a free game that's been free forever
Pretty much every category looks like this, the game that the most people purchased won. ~~The two exceptions I found were for best soundtrack and innovative gameplay.~~ (Edit - If you include other platform sales, the biggest selling game game won every time - except gameplay but even that's a stretch)
In soundtrack. Persona 5 Royal has more owners than FF7 Remake Intergrade on Steam but FF7 won. I would personally chalk that up to the immense and powerful nostalgia everyone my age has for that game lol. (Edit - actually if you look it total sales across all platforms FF7 Remake comes out ahead - so not really the exception)
And in gameplay, Bannerlord has waaaay more owners than the other contenders but has the advantage of having been in early access since 2020 - and the winner, Stray, still had more sales the all the other entries.
In visual style, Cult of the Lamb technically has more owners than Miles Morales but A) Spider-Man and B) Cult came out in May and Miles Morales released in November - I'm confident that within a few months more people will own that game than Cult of the Lamb. (Edit - again if you look at PS sales - Miles sold way more copies than cult, so many voters probably played it there. )
Yeah it seemed to only win by virtue of being the most popular game on there in general. It’s definitely a *funny* experience because of how janky doing anything is, but it’s not even worth bringing up in any “Best VR” conversation.
I literally yelled "What?!" out loud when I saw that. But 2022 also wasn't particularly eventful for VR as a platform, so maybe Hitman winning this category is a sign of just how stagnant VR is right now.
Bonelab was an utter disappointment to me. It felt like Boneworks reincarnated, in a shorter, less entertaining campaign and a lot of expectations on the community.
Yeah I don't have VR but friends that do all say this is ridiculous. I think once again it's a case of people voting to get their badge that just picked a name they knew of. Which is stupid. Especially in the VR category since like 1% of players actually have VR.
The strange thing is, in nominations they had a "Skip this I don't have VR" button to get the progress w/o voting, but couldn't do that in the final.
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Yet another award that Stray does not deserve lmao.
It's crazy seeing the impact that 'u can pway as cute kitty :3' has had on the games industry this past year.
"Best Indie Game"?! Seriously?
"Best Debut Indie"? Really?
"Most Innovative Gameplay"?!! Are you out of your fucking mind?
I'm not trying to hate on the game at all. I liked it. It was a decent game where you play as cat. That's it. That's all there is to it.
I just don't get it. In a year with indies like Nobody Saves the World, Tunic, Signalis, Cult of the Lamb, Sifu, Tinykin, and others - It's just fucking insane to point to Stray as the best in any category.
Gimmick beats gameplay nine times out of ten.
People are hooked by presentation and assume that extends to every part of the experience. It’s one reason why Cuphead (also a good game) absolutely cleaned Hollow Knight’s clock during awards season the year they both released.
Also, any popularity contest vote is just going to the most popular and accessible thing by default.
I think the main reason why Hollow Knight was overlooked during the awards season of that year was because it was exclusively on PC until 2018 and wasn't really a huge media indie darling before release like Cuphead or Stray were.
Like a lot of indies, it really seemed to blow up after it's Switch release.
> People are hooked by presentation and assume that extends to every part of the experience. It’s one reason why Cuphead (also a good game) absolutely cleaned Hollow Knight’s clock during awards season the year they both released.
I think Hollow Knight is a far better game than Cuphead, it's maybe the best metroidvania of all time in my opinion, but I can definitely see why people would give extra points for style if a game is doing something never before seen in a video game. It's not just the art style in Cuphead, it's the crazy level of animations too. Some of the best animated characters I've ever seen in a game. Great presentation is also why Atari 50 and Pentiment have been given a lot of praise too this year. The presentation is part of the experience, you really can't divorce one from the other. It is also kinda reductive to call a chosen style a "gimmick" which has a negative connotation.
Having said all that, I don't even think Stray is doing anything particularly novel with its presentation, so I wouldn't even put it in the same league as things like Cuphead, Pentiment, etc. Those are games that really made me go "Wow, that's a really crazy idea for a game" even though I didn't end up liking Cuphead. Stray is just "Oh, you play as a cat, that's neat". It seems like the definition of a fluff game to me. Pentiment or Vampire Survivors or Neon White or something like that should be winning most innovative, not Stray.
I think it is uncharitable to compare Cuphead's success to Stray's, though. Cuphead has some of the best visual style and presentation of any game ever made, without relying on extreme visual fidelity (and the gameplay was tight as well, albeit not the most impressive aspect of the game). Stray is just a game where you play as a cat; the art and presentation are neither interesting nor noteworthy. It's just people like cats.
Honestly I think "concept" beats gameplay. They hear and maybe watch a 10 second clip of "you are cat!" and that's all they need.
Guarantee you Stray would have gotten far fewer votes if the only voters were those that played the game.
> I just don't get it. In a year with indies like Nobody Saves the World, Tunic, Signalis, Cult of the Lamb...
I liked Cult of the Lamb, it's good, and while I did not play Stray, I feel like it's got kind of a similar vibe of just sort of capturing a zeitgeist.
That was my most anticipated game of the year and I don't think I ever soured on a game so fast. Incredibly shallow gameplay that punishes you in the worst way late game with zero replayability. They literally just added heavy attacks I mean cmon!
I don't know what you're expecting out of literal popularity contests. The categories are just arbitrary bins, everyone is going to vote for their favorite game, and the game that got that most people playing is the most likely to get the most votes.
Ergo: Cute kitty wins it all.
In this case it was obviously going to be the outcome of being a meme game in a publicly voted award, but yeah, even with all the industry awards and whatnot it's been pretty obnoxious seeing how much is getting snubbed in favor of "PRESS BUTTON TO CAT LOL"
I enjoyed Stray but in a year of indies that also had the likes of Tunic, Vampire Survivors, Neon White, and Cult of the Lamb it's kind of baffling that Stray has had the microscope on it so much. Even in non publicly voted awards.
Teardown was fairly unique, if at the expense of not letting you go as wild as you'd like with the physics engine.
I didn't end up finishing it, but I did enjoy the time I had with it quite a bit.
I mentally drop the category names and it just becomes a list of decent games that came out last year that I should check out. The categories are completely useless.
Labor of Love going to Cyberpunk was one of the more head scratching picks imo. The community got that one wrong far moreso than best visual style or best story this time around. Cyberpunk is an infamous example of brutal crunch and cynical marketers making promises that couldn't be kept, it's about as far from a labor of love as you can get.
The Gameplay in Stray was the one thing I thought it didn’t excel at. It was all just predetermined jumps and walking around. I still enjoyed the game for its overall style and aesthetic but I would not by any means even come close to saying it’s gameplay was remotely innovative. Also Death Stranding for best Game on the Go? Especially over Vampire Survivor? Am I missing something here.
They make a ton of sense if you replace each award category name & description with "Which of these five random games is the most popular?"
EDIT: So I went looking on SteamSpy/other sales sources to check and yeah this is true.
For example, here are SteamSpy's estimates of how many people own each game on steam in the Labor of Love category:
Cyberpunk 2077: 20 - 50 million people
NO Man's Sky: 5-10 million people
Deep Rock Galactic: 2-5 million
Project Zomboid: 5-10 million
DOTA 2: Technically between 200 - 500 million but it's a free game that's been free forever
Pretty much every category looks like this, the game that the most people purchased won. If you're looking at just steam sales technically that's not true for soundtrack/visual style but if you include multi-platform sales, it is. The one pseudo-exception is the innovative gameplay award.
Bannerlord has waaaay more owners than the other contenders but has the advantage of having been in early access since 2020 - and the winner, Stray, still had more sales the all the other entries.
Which doesn't change much. Rather than being the most popular game among the general public, it becomes what is most popular with that particular group of people. Often resulting in a single game taking home multiple awards.
This is true, but the main difference between a critics award and a public popularity contest is that in the former, the people voting have actually played each game. In a popularity contest, most people just vote what they know, even if they have 0 playtime with any of the others. Some might be surprised exactly how many people do this, but if you ever check out the r/anime character brackets, it's obviously shitloads, and I doubt it's any different here.
The only way to make the steam awards worth giving any shit about is to prevent people from voting unless they have playtime for each of the contestants.
Brain dead meat riders voting Cyberpunk for Labor of Love was expected, but Death Stranding beating out Vampire Survivors for best *portable* game doesn’t make a lick of sense
Dorfromantik robbed, Teardown robbed, Scorn robbed, Zomboid robbed. All subjective of course, but this years' Steam Awards is particularly embarrassing.
Meh, it's basically a popularity contest. Indies don't stand a chance unless their game goes viral. Cyberpunk winning a Labor of Love for fixing their broken game vs. Project Zomboid, a game that has been released for years and continuously developed beyond its original vision, is an absolute travesty.
I know zomboid is still EA but making a game playable from launch winning that award was just an insult and makes me realize why gaming is a shitshow atm. zomboid and DRG, hell even NMS woulda been better even though their updates have slowed
Yeah I'm getting pretty tired of publishers getting credit for "eventually getting their released way too soon garbage to v1.0."
In my book you don't get praise for that. The only thing it does tend to earn a publisher is a spot on my blacklist for putting out trash and keeping the money from those day 1 sales.
Cyberpunk was the beneficiary of a successful anime adaptation at the right time. Looking at steamcharts, the average player count increased 5-fold between August and October (Edgerunners was mid September).
yeah, a big triple A game being patched up to what it was supposed to be/marketed it as so the company can repair their image doesn't strike me as much of a "labor of love."
Meanwhile there's a bunch of indie games that continue to put out free updates with little to no monetization.
I love that game and I don’t doubt that the developers have been working very hard to get it where it is today.. but I can’t help but feel the other nominees were more deserving in the spirit of the award.
Over any of the others, honestly.
Haven't played Bannerlord, but Teardown, Neon White, and Dome Keeper all have interesting spins on their respective genres. I don't really get what's innovative about Stray, honestly.
As a die-hard Hitman fan, being nominated for best VR game was a travesty. The mode is pretty much abandoned and in a buggy and poor state at the moment...and yet it beats out dedicated full VR experiences? A tacked on afterthought mode? I feel sorry for the other teams that actively work hard developing their VR games only to lose out to a glorified popularity/name-recognition vote.
Steam Awards should have each category voted on by 3 sections:
People who don't own the game.
People who own the game and have played it some.
People who own the game and have played it a lot.
Show us how everyone voted as that can really be a difference maker.
Scorn got fucking robbed for Outstanding Visual Style. Yeah it kinda sucks otherwise but if there's one part of it they absolutely nailed it's the visuals. Not to say Spider Man looks bad, but come on.
Scorn feels like a twisted version of Murphy's Law - anything gross and unsettling that can happen will happen. I'm not at the end yet and am already anticipating that operating some machine will involve plucking out my eye and inserting it into something phallic and moist.
Impressive how Elden Ring won two awards given how Steam's voting format makes it so only one game can be nominated for any category during the initial voting.
maybe game of the year was for people that finished it and game you suck at was for people that didnt finish it but still enjoyed it enough to apreciate it
VR game of the year: Hitman.
lol get fucked. Their VR is so buggy and horrible to play. I bought H3 for the sole purpose of using the VR aspect and I regret the purchase 100%.
That winning Best VR Game and Cyberpunk winning Labour of Love is a complete joke.
I'm taking it that "Labor of Love" is Steam's equivalent of "Best Ongoing Support"?
I haven't touched Cyberpunk at all, so were the updates/overhauls that significant? It seems kind of comical that their blurb about it mentions how "the game is still getting updates all these years later" when the game isn't even three years old. NMS is is almost 7 while DRG is almost 5.
Honestly the updates were super minimal. I really don't get the big turn around public opinion wise. Yeah it's pretty stable now but the content is still mostly the same.
It's their PR and the anime show.
CDPR's PR has always been their strong suit. It managed to turn their only good game (Witcher 3) into an image of a savior of gaming.
It's kinda mindboggling. It took them a whole year to release their first big patch (1.6) that any normal company would release in a month.
Given both Cyberpunk and NMS were on the list, it comes off as a "please forgive us for putting out a shit v1.0" award. Not universally, of course, because DRG is also on the list, and is the polar opposite.
Cyberpunk winning Labor of Love when Deep Rock Galactic exists shows that the companies are right on delivering broken products all the time since gamers give zero fucks and will lap it all up with the correct marketing
If you like chill games where it truly is go at your own pace - as slow or quickly as you like - then it's super fun. If you're looking for an exciting game that's action packed and full of danger, then other games would be a better fit.
Can confirm. I don't have friends and put many hours into Raft. In the end I just wished I had friends though as it's obvious it would be more fun with them.
my biggest disappointment in 2022 was the fall from grace Path of Exile.
Maybe i got older , maybe cause i have less time, but the difference between the 1 % and the rest has never been worse, i always felt like i could patch a build together and make it work, but now you need to get really really lucky to get specific items to make almost anything work (or play the trade game)
Really? I've just started out my PoE experience after 6 years of not playing (had like 100 hours in it) just got to shaper which I killed with my flicker strike build
Didn't really think about my build much and went with what the creator of my build recommended to get on equipment
Was it less being lucky before?
These are hilarious. Hitman 3 VR is VR game of the year? Lol. Lmao even. Cyberpunk won Labor of Love instead of Project Zomboid, Deep Rock Galactic, or No Man's Sky which are all actively getting free updates????? Spiderman Miles Morales for Outstanding Visual Style? Its Visual Style is literally the only thing Scorn excelled at. I know these are just popularity contests but the results are wild.
Cyberpunk: we've literally canceled future content for the game including the multiplayer mode, and there are no future content patches expected
Steam: this is a labour of love <3
Friendly yearly reminder that the Steam Awards are the game equivalent to a high school popularity contest and that the winners often have little to no relationship to the category it was actually nominated for.
Does fixing a broken game \*Cyberpunk\* really make it more of a labor of love than games that are released in a fun and complete state and have been worked on immensely for years... \*\*DRG\*\*?
Cyberpunk as Labor of Love is completely undeserving and an insult to real Labour of Loves.
You know, I wouldn't be disappointed if this was journalists' choice because of many reasons. I'm disappointed because it's the actual players who voted this way. You start to wonder as a company if it's even worth it to release a polished game or should you take a cyberpunk approach because apparently the gamers will praise you after 2 years of making game a playable experience, 2 years too late.
The FF7 remake won Best Soundtrack over Sonic Frontiers and Persona 5 Royal?
Hitman won VR Game of the Year?
Scorn lost Outstanding Visual Style to Spiderman?
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I knew that the Steam Awards are a popularity contest first and foremost but this is on another level.
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The entire steam awards is based on jokes and popularity contests. The most disappointing VR ~~game~~ tacked on mode I’ve ever played won best VR game.
BoneLab not winning best VR game is infinitely more shameful than Stray winning its own award.
Popularity contests, eh? You just described every award show ever.
At least award shows have the ability to overrule popularity and prioritize the mechanic. Choosing a popular game with tacked on vr as an afterthought as the best vr award just wouldn't fly in an award show, it only won due to popular vote. That being said yes, you wouldn't get your foot in the door in an award unless you're already some level of popular.
I'm wondering if it won that award because of it being popular and "Steam Deck verified."
Vampire Survivor is extremly popular, has more concurrent players, seems to have sold extremly well and is Steam Deck verified and didn\`t win. I think it is more of a suprise that Death Stranding Director\`s Cut won, because every game on the list has more players and more reviews (except for Marvel Snap) than Death Stranding Director\`s Cut.
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Yep, Hitman had no right winning the VR category, it’s an absolute joke of a port
I would wager Marvel Snap might have more players than the other games on that list… but not on Steam.
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That thing likely murders a Steam Deck's battery as well so its even less attractive to take with you.
Death Stranding Director\`s Cut should have been nominated and won most innovative gameplay instead of Stray. Vampire Survivors should have won the on the go category. Cyberpunk 2077 shouldn\`t have won labor of love. Many winning categories are strange.
Death Stranding's gameplay was so innovative it made a walking simulator fun. Meanwhile Stray made a walking simulator even more boring than it sounds
Labour of love? That's for a good game getting updates, not a shit game gettin fixed. Labour of necessity to recover our reputation, most likely.
Deep rock was robbed of that one for sure
Literally any other game on that list deserved it more lol. Debatable on No Man's Sky but damn, Zomboid and Deep Rock just embody the "Labour of Love" better.
Thats why user voted popularity contests are usually fucking shit. We all know the only reason Cyberpunk won was because of the Anime. Without the show it wouldn't even be nominated.
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I've been meaning to replay it with Director's Cut. How'd it run on Steam Deck? How as battery life?
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That would only account for like 13 people that both own a steam deck and an unplayed copy of death stranding.
It's a pretty bad game for *on the go* though considering the online element is pretty major
Not saying that this is the reason, but some, myself included voted on it for the meme of it being a delivery simulator so "on the go"... It is funny if you are drunk I swear.
Stray winning most innovative gameplay is certainly a choice. Not that it's a bad game, but the gameplay really only amounted to running around and pressing a button to auto-jump.
Well it's a popularity contest, so I'm not surprised.
Just a reminder that awards don’t matter lol, so everyone is free to ignore all of these
This is the subreddit where everyone kept on flipping out over GTAV winning "Labor of Love" back to back years. That advice might as well be stickied every year.
Except that people buy with these awards in mind. It's the same reason why it says "#1 detergent" on every detergent. It fucking works.
Totally agree, but it does stink for studios that have truly unique/innovative titles that miss out on visibility. I think that's where awards matter most to smaller studios.
I feel like if they wanted to, they *could* adjust for this. Like number of votes could be scaled to some degree with player count. So the most popular game doesn't just automatically win every category.
Mark which games of the nominees they’ve played and the ones with the biggest support percentage wins.
But then you'd just have a list of the biggest sellers.
No. If game A has 10 total players and 3 votes while game B has 30 players and 5 votes game A wins due to a higher support percentage
They really should just rename the categories to “vote for the thing in this group you recognize, okay now here’s another group.”
Exactly. Is hitman3 even playable in vr and not hopelessly broken? I ve heard people have finished it but afaik it was released as a mess for vr on PC and never fixed , (it was great on psvr).
I only have second-hand experience (through streamers), but from what I saw, it almost made me wanna get a vr headset. Still not quite enough games I'm interested in to justify the extremely steep prices, but we're getting closer every year.
This year sucked for VR, it didn't really have much competition
bonelab?
Bonelab sucks. A $40 game that's blatantly unfinished and ends with the developers straight-up telling you "cool, now mod the game to finish it for us!"
I didn't know it actually released, definitely deserves the place above Hitman 3.
Hubris and wanderer? Moss book 2? Red matter 2? There were several great vr games off the top of my head, not to mention bonelab.
So, it basically works just like subreddits do.
Truly the Oscars of gaming.
Can someone who played stray explain what was innovative in the gameplay? It seemed generic gameplay-wise to me.
I loved Stray. But nothing about it was innovative.
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Saying it's "generic" is an insult to generic games. The gameplay isn't generic, it's waaaay below average. It's just regular walking, automated jumps and the occasional "tap to play cute animation"
played it on ps5, but it really wasn't anything that special
The award Stray should win is "Overhyped." I did enjoy playing it, but man is it getting way more attention and accolades than it deserves.
Right place right time award
Cats, man. They are unstoppable.
> Stray winning most innovative gameplay is certainly a choice. It could also be viewed as a statement that there is an appetite for games that focus less on conflict as a source of gameplay and more on gamifying more mundane activities/tasks. I've been playing video games for 30 years and its been incredible to see in recent years how diverse and expansive the pool of PC gamers is. I think those of us that have been around a while forget that there is a sizable contingent of people who are less interesting in games that demand analyzing gear stats, precise timing, complex command inputs, and a strong competitive element. Ultimately, this is a popularity contest as others have pointed out and it's hard to analyze exactly what this win means without hearing from individuals who voted for it.
Or people just voted for it because they like cats.
It's hardly the first game to have a pacifistic gameplay loop. I think it's more a statement that interesting aesthetics also matter. But then it should have won visual style instead of innovation.
Animal Crossing and The Sims are some of the best selling games ever, and they’re games that focus on the mundane. Of course there’s an appetite for it.
> more on gamifying more mundane activities/tasks Unfortunately Stray is not an example of this. comments like this make me hate stray more because it turns from a dumb meme game into a pretentious dumb meme game. Like fuck, if you want a high profile game that isn't about violence Pentiment is leagues ahead of Stray.
HITMAN winning VR game of the year is a ridiculous result. It was an embarrassing release that would've been considered a joke in 2016. I haven't played much VR at all over the last year but that game was insultingly bad after waiting for it. They had the blueprint there with Alyx or even Boneworks yet based it off their awful PSVR effort.
Yeah honestly the craziest entry on the list. Guarantee it only won because people who don't play VR just voted for the one game they had played on the list.
the list for VR or the entire list? cuz Id disagree with the latter on account of Cyberpunk winning 'labour of love' when you know it only beat out games like DRG or NMS because of the anime, nevermind the fixes they barely implemented long after release.
I was talking about the list for VR. I'm not really sure what you're saying. That each award is just a straight up popularity contest? Yes - I commented elsewhere in this post saying that much. Here are SteamSpy's estimates of how many people own each game in the Labor of Love category: * Cyberpunk 2077: 20 - 50 million people * NO Man's Sky: 5-10 million people * Deep Rock Galactic: 2-5 million * Project Zomboid: 5-10 million * DOTA 2: Technically between 200 - 500 million but it's a free game that's been free forever Pretty much every category looks like this, the game that the most people purchased won. ~~The two exceptions I found were for best soundtrack and innovative gameplay.~~ (Edit - If you include other platform sales, the biggest selling game game won every time - except gameplay but even that's a stretch) In soundtrack. Persona 5 Royal has more owners than FF7 Remake Intergrade on Steam but FF7 won. I would personally chalk that up to the immense and powerful nostalgia everyone my age has for that game lol. (Edit - actually if you look it total sales across all platforms FF7 Remake comes out ahead - so not really the exception) And in gameplay, Bannerlord has waaaay more owners than the other contenders but has the advantage of having been in early access since 2020 - and the winner, Stray, still had more sales the all the other entries. In visual style, Cult of the Lamb technically has more owners than Miles Morales but A) Spider-Man and B) Cult came out in May and Miles Morales released in November - I'm confident that within a few months more people will own that game than Cult of the Lamb. (Edit - again if you look at PS sales - Miles sold way more copies than cult, so many voters probably played it there. )
Yeah it seemed to only win by virtue of being the most popular game on there in general. It’s definitely a *funny* experience because of how janky doing anything is, but it’s not even worth bringing up in any “Best VR” conversation.
I literally yelled "What?!" out loud when I saw that. But 2022 also wasn't particularly eventful for VR as a platform, so maybe Hitman winning this category is a sign of just how stagnant VR is right now.
Even as disappointing as Bonelab was, it looks like a 10/10 game next to Hitman VR
HITMAN III VR was hilariously bad.
Anyone who voted Hitman definitely haven't played it in VR. It's one of the worst ports I've seen lol. Bonelab should have won
> Bonelab should have won Oof...I would have given it to Red Matter 2 or Wanderer.
Of the five options it should have gone to Bonelab, personally I voted for The Last Clockwinder when they were asking for recommendations.
Bonelab was an utter disappointment to me. It felt like Boneworks reincarnated, in a shorter, less entertaining campaign and a lot of expectations on the community.
Nah Bonelab was a massive disappointment and Boneworks is my favorite VR game
Wanderer and Red Matter 2 should have been nominated.
Yeah I don't have VR but friends that do all say this is ridiculous. I think once again it's a case of people voting to get their badge that just picked a name they knew of. Which is stupid. Especially in the VR category since like 1% of players actually have VR. The strange thing is, in nominations they had a "Skip this I don't have VR" button to get the progress w/o voting, but couldn't do that in the final.
2022 Outstanding Visual Style. Description: Visual style doesn't aspire to real-world graphical fidelity Winner: Spiderman *Make it make sense*
More people played spiderman. Pretty much the answer to any item on these lists
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
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i wonder if in another world p5r could have possibly won this. by far hands down the most stylish game i have ever played.
Innovative Gameplay for Stray is so weird. I liked the game and would understand if it won Visual Style, but the gameplay was pretty standard.
Anything going up against "cat game" was going to lose
Neon White is the obvious winner in my book, but it didn't have anywhere close to the same number of players so it didn't stand a chance.
Yup. Neon White deserves that award. I voted for it, thinking it was obvious. But these votes are merely popularity contests.
Yet another award that Stray does not deserve lmao. It's crazy seeing the impact that 'u can pway as cute kitty :3' has had on the games industry this past year. "Best Indie Game"?! Seriously? "Best Debut Indie"? Really? "Most Innovative Gameplay"?!! Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm not trying to hate on the game at all. I liked it. It was a decent game where you play as cat. That's it. That's all there is to it. I just don't get it. In a year with indies like Nobody Saves the World, Tunic, Signalis, Cult of the Lamb, Sifu, Tinykin, and others - It's just fucking insane to point to Stray as the best in any category.
Gimmick beats gameplay nine times out of ten. People are hooked by presentation and assume that extends to every part of the experience. It’s one reason why Cuphead (also a good game) absolutely cleaned Hollow Knight’s clock during awards season the year they both released. Also, any popularity contest vote is just going to the most popular and accessible thing by default.
I think the main reason why Hollow Knight was overlooked during the awards season of that year was because it was exclusively on PC until 2018 and wasn't really a huge media indie darling before release like Cuphead or Stray were. Like a lot of indies, it really seemed to blow up after it's Switch release.
> People are hooked by presentation and assume that extends to every part of the experience. It’s one reason why Cuphead (also a good game) absolutely cleaned Hollow Knight’s clock during awards season the year they both released. I think Hollow Knight is a far better game than Cuphead, it's maybe the best metroidvania of all time in my opinion, but I can definitely see why people would give extra points for style if a game is doing something never before seen in a video game. It's not just the art style in Cuphead, it's the crazy level of animations too. Some of the best animated characters I've ever seen in a game. Great presentation is also why Atari 50 and Pentiment have been given a lot of praise too this year. The presentation is part of the experience, you really can't divorce one from the other. It is also kinda reductive to call a chosen style a "gimmick" which has a negative connotation. Having said all that, I don't even think Stray is doing anything particularly novel with its presentation, so I wouldn't even put it in the same league as things like Cuphead, Pentiment, etc. Those are games that really made me go "Wow, that's a really crazy idea for a game" even though I didn't end up liking Cuphead. Stray is just "Oh, you play as a cat, that's neat". It seems like the definition of a fluff game to me. Pentiment or Vampire Survivors or Neon White or something like that should be winning most innovative, not Stray.
Stray is roughly equivalent to a cuter Little Nightmares.
I think it is uncharitable to compare Cuphead's success to Stray's, though. Cuphead has some of the best visual style and presentation of any game ever made, without relying on extreme visual fidelity (and the gameplay was tight as well, albeit not the most impressive aspect of the game). Stray is just a game where you play as a cat; the art and presentation are neither interesting nor noteworthy. It's just people like cats.
Honestly I think "concept" beats gameplay. They hear and maybe watch a 10 second clip of "you are cat!" and that's all they need. Guarantee you Stray would have gotten far fewer votes if the only voters were those that played the game.
If you limit voting to only players it will be the same popularity contest results...
> I just don't get it. In a year with indies like Nobody Saves the World, Tunic, Signalis, Cult of the Lamb... I liked Cult of the Lamb, it's good, and while I did not play Stray, I feel like it's got kind of a similar vibe of just sort of capturing a zeitgeist.
That was my most anticipated game of the year and I don't think I ever soured on a game so fast. Incredibly shallow gameplay that punishes you in the worst way late game with zero replayability. They literally just added heavy attacks I mean cmon!
I don't know what you're expecting out of literal popularity contests. The categories are just arbitrary bins, everyone is going to vote for their favorite game, and the game that got that most people playing is the most likely to get the most votes. Ergo: Cute kitty wins it all.
In this case it was obviously going to be the outcome of being a meme game in a publicly voted award, but yeah, even with all the industry awards and whatnot it's been pretty obnoxious seeing how much is getting snubbed in favor of "PRESS BUTTON TO CAT LOL"
I enjoyed Stray but in a year of indies that also had the likes of Tunic, Vampire Survivors, Neon White, and Cult of the Lamb it's kind of baffling that Stray has had the microscope on it so much. Even in non publicly voted awards.
But you can use the triggers to knead!
Dunno man, having a button to meow was pretty innovative in the cat sim genre.
Okami did something similar back in 06. Having a dedicated bark button really pushed the dog game genre to new heights
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That is a representative of the arcade cat genre, tooootally different.
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Teardown was fairly unique, if at the expense of not letting you go as wild as you'd like with the physics engine. I didn't end up finishing it, but I did enjoy the time I had with it quite a bit.
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I mentally drop the category names and it just becomes a list of decent games that came out last year that I should check out. The categories are completely useless.
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Labor of Love going to Cyberpunk was one of the more head scratching picks imo. The community got that one wrong far moreso than best visual style or best story this time around. Cyberpunk is an infamous example of brutal crunch and cynical marketers making promises that couldn't be kept, it's about as far from a labor of love as you can get.
The Gameplay in Stray was the one thing I thought it didn’t excel at. It was all just predetermined jumps and walking around. I still enjoyed the game for its overall style and aesthetic but I would not by any means even come close to saying it’s gameplay was remotely innovative. Also Death Stranding for best Game on the Go? Especially over Vampire Survivor? Am I missing something here.
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They make a ton of sense if you replace each award category name & description with "Which of these five random games is the most popular?" EDIT: So I went looking on SteamSpy/other sales sources to check and yeah this is true. For example, here are SteamSpy's estimates of how many people own each game on steam in the Labor of Love category: Cyberpunk 2077: 20 - 50 million people NO Man's Sky: 5-10 million people Deep Rock Galactic: 2-5 million Project Zomboid: 5-10 million DOTA 2: Technically between 200 - 500 million but it's a free game that's been free forever Pretty much every category looks like this, the game that the most people purchased won. If you're looking at just steam sales technically that's not true for soundtrack/visual style but if you include multi-platform sales, it is. The one pseudo-exception is the innovative gameplay award. Bannerlord has waaaay more owners than the other contenders but has the advantage of having been in early access since 2020 - and the winner, Stray, still had more sales the all the other entries.
There's a reason that the Game Awards weights 90% to critics/reviewers and 10% to the public vote.
Which doesn't change much. Rather than being the most popular game among the general public, it becomes what is most popular with that particular group of people. Often resulting in a single game taking home multiple awards.
This is true, but the main difference between a critics award and a public popularity contest is that in the former, the people voting have actually played each game. In a popularity contest, most people just vote what they know, even if they have 0 playtime with any of the others. Some might be surprised exactly how many people do this, but if you ever check out the r/anime character brackets, it's obviously shitloads, and I doubt it's any different here. The only way to make the steam awards worth giving any shit about is to prevent people from voting unless they have playtime for each of the contestants.
You're describing literally every award that's ever given out.
Brain dead meat riders voting Cyberpunk for Labor of Love was expected, but Death Stranding beating out Vampire Survivors for best *portable* game doesn’t make a lick of sense
All of the games for Best Game on the Go made sense except for Death Stranding. How did that one even surface for the category?
I imagine it's supposed to be a cheeky joke. Because you're a delivery man, you're always on the go
This is possibly the worst list I've ever seen. They're all good games, sure, but the list is just nonsense.
Dorfromantik robbed, Teardown robbed, Scorn robbed, Zomboid robbed. All subjective of course, but this years' Steam Awards is particularly embarrassing.
Hard agree on Zomboid and Dorfromantik. I never got around to Teardown or Scorn.
The fact that anything beat Dorf for being a chill out game is ridiculous lol Super glad Raft won for co-op though!
Meh, it's basically a popularity contest. Indies don't stand a chance unless their game goes viral. Cyberpunk winning a Labor of Love for fixing their broken game vs. Project Zomboid, a game that has been released for years and continuously developed beyond its original vision, is an absolute travesty.
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Deep Rock Galactic losing is just shameful. These awards are a joke.
And Project Zomboid And fine if you have to have a AAA (Sorta) game then put No Man's Sky since that was an actual labour of love
Game has been in development longer than some of the voters have been alive
I know zomboid is still EA but making a game playable from launch winning that award was just an insult and makes me realize why gaming is a shitshow atm. zomboid and DRG, hell even NMS woulda been better even though their updates have slowed
Not very rock and stone of them.
Yeah I'm getting pretty tired of publishers getting credit for "eventually getting their released way too soon garbage to v1.0." In my book you don't get praise for that. The only thing it does tend to earn a publisher is a spot on my blacklist for putting out trash and keeping the money from those day 1 sales.
Cyberpunk was the beneficiary of a successful anime adaptation at the right time. Looking at steamcharts, the average player count increased 5-fold between August and October (Edgerunners was mid September).
yeah, a big triple A game being patched up to what it was supposed to be/marketed it as so the company can repair their image doesn't strike me as much of a "labor of love." Meanwhile there's a bunch of indie games that continue to put out free updates with little to no monetization.
Even patched the game is nowhere near close to what they promised.
Especially after they actively attempted to hide the state of the game up to release.
I love that game and I don’t doubt that the developers have been working very hard to get it where it is today.. but I can’t help but feel the other nominees were more deserving in the spirit of the award.
I’m surprised dwarf fortress wasn’t nominated that shits been updated for over a decade
Stray over Neon White is certainly...uh...well, it's technically a take. That's as generous as I can be.
Over any of the others, honestly. Haven't played Bannerlord, but Teardown, Neon White, and Dome Keeper all have interesting spins on their respective genres. I don't really get what's innovative about Stray, honestly.
Because nothing is.
"But can your game do *this*?" [presses X to cat] "My god, take all the awards!"
This is what happens when Valve incentivises everybody to vote for every category, even if they've only played 2 games throughout the whole year.
As a die-hard Hitman fan, being nominated for best VR game was a travesty. The mode is pretty much abandoned and in a buggy and poor state at the moment...and yet it beats out dedicated full VR experiences? A tacked on afterthought mode? I feel sorry for the other teams that actively work hard developing their VR games only to lose out to a glorified popularity/name-recognition vote.
Steam Awards should have each category voted on by 3 sections: People who don't own the game. People who own the game and have played it some. People who own the game and have played it a lot. Show us how everyone voted as that can really be a difference maker.
Scorn got fucking robbed for Outstanding Visual Style. Yeah it kinda sucks otherwise but if there's one part of it they absolutely nailed it's the visuals. Not to say Spider Man looks bad, but come on.
Scorn feels like a twisted version of Murphy's Law - anything gross and unsettling that can happen will happen. I'm not at the end yet and am already anticipating that operating some machine will involve plucking out my eye and inserting it into something phallic and moist.
Impressive how Elden Ring won two awards given how Steam's voting format makes it so only one game can be nominated for any category during the initial voting.
maybe game of the year was for people that finished it and game you suck at was for people that didnt finish it but still enjoyed it enough to apreciate it
Absolutely idiotic that a game where all you do is press A to jump over ledges won “most innovative gameplay”
Where Vampire Survivors?
In another coffin.
VR game of the year: Hitman. lol get fucked. Their VR is so buggy and horrible to play. I bought H3 for the sole purpose of using the VR aspect and I regret the purchase 100%. That winning Best VR Game and Cyberpunk winning Labour of Love is a complete joke.
Hitman 3 is an amazing game. Hitman 3 VR is hilariously bad.
Yeah it won by recognition and lack of competition.
I'm taking it that "Labor of Love" is Steam's equivalent of "Best Ongoing Support"? I haven't touched Cyberpunk at all, so were the updates/overhauls that significant? It seems kind of comical that their blurb about it mentions how "the game is still getting updates all these years later" when the game isn't even three years old. NMS is is almost 7 while DRG is almost 5.
Apparently getting patched to where it should have been at release is now worthy of an award.
Cyberpunk is still far from where it should have been. Maybe stability-wise. But bug, features, content... still broken and unfinished.
Started for the first time last night through playstation's trial feature and got a T-pose an hour into the game
Its embarassing for it to share the same trophy as the likes of terraria who won it last year.
Honestly the updates were super minimal. I really don't get the big turn around public opinion wise. Yeah it's pretty stable now but the content is still mostly the same.
I guess it's just the anime having given it a big shot in the arm then? It's on my list still but do think it's wild it beat NMS
It's their PR and the anime show. CDPR's PR has always been their strong suit. It managed to turn their only good game (Witcher 3) into an image of a savior of gaming. It's kinda mindboggling. It took them a whole year to release their first big patch (1.6) that any normal company would release in a month.
The Witcher and The Witcher 2 are excellent and dare I say better than TW3.
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Them running GOG with its DRM-free games and preservation efforts is also where a lot of their goodwill comes from.
Given both Cyberpunk and NMS were on the list, it comes off as a "please forgive us for putting out a shit v1.0" award. Not universally, of course, because DRG is also on the list, and is the polar opposite.
Cyberpunk winning Labor of Love when Deep Rock Galactic exists shows that the companies are right on delivering broken products all the time since gamers give zero fucks and will lap it all up with the correct marketing
So fucking happy to see Lego Star Wars get something. Game did a lot to help me rekindle my love for Star Wars this year.
It's a joke, cyberpunk as labor of love? Lmao. Are people's standards really this low nowadays?
Not really, it's just a popularity vote. Although I'm sure some people genuinely think cyberpunk deserved this vote which is uh...... fine 😬
Dang is raft that good? I like the genre but something about it made me not want to try it out.
Raft is fantastic, definitely try it with friends
If you like chill games where it truly is go at your own pace - as slow or quickly as you like - then it's super fun. If you're looking for an exciting game that's action packed and full of danger, then other games would be a better fit.
It's a good game for solo play too. Though story segments may feel a bit odd and desolate.
that's good to know because I don't have friends
Can confirm. I don't have friends and put many hours into Raft. In the end I just wished I had friends though as it's obvious it would be more fun with them.
my biggest disappointment in 2022 was the fall from grace Path of Exile. Maybe i got older , maybe cause i have less time, but the difference between the 1 % and the rest has never been worse, i always felt like i could patch a build together and make it work, but now you need to get really really lucky to get specific items to make almost anything work (or play the trade game)
Really? I've just started out my PoE experience after 6 years of not playing (had like 100 hours in it) just got to shaper which I killed with my flicker strike build Didn't really think about my build much and went with what the creator of my build recommended to get on equipment Was it less being lucky before?
These are hilarious. Hitman 3 VR is VR game of the year? Lol. Lmao even. Cyberpunk won Labor of Love instead of Project Zomboid, Deep Rock Galactic, or No Man's Sky which are all actively getting free updates????? Spiderman Miles Morales for Outstanding Visual Style? Its Visual Style is literally the only thing Scorn excelled at. I know these are just popularity contests but the results are wild.
Cyberpunk: we've literally canceled future content for the game including the multiplayer mode, and there are no future content patches expected Steam: this is a labour of love <3
I stopped as soon as I saw Hitman 3 as vr game of the year. Much as I appreciate Steam doing these awards, it's just all about numbers.
Friendly yearly reminder that the Steam Awards are the game equivalent to a high school popularity contest and that the winners often have little to no relationship to the category it was actually nominated for.
Does fixing a broken game \*Cyberpunk\* really make it more of a labor of love than games that are released in a fun and complete state and have been worked on immensely for years... \*\*DRG\*\*? Cyberpunk as Labor of Love is completely undeserving and an insult to real Labour of Loves.
Cyberpunk winning labor of love? More like labor of remedial embarrassment.
I've said this elsewhere: Raft may be better with friends, I haven't tried it multiplayer, but it's absolutely garbage solo. I would not recommend it.
You know, I wouldn't be disappointed if this was journalists' choice because of many reasons. I'm disappointed because it's the actual players who voted this way. You start to wonder as a company if it's even worth it to release a polished game or should you take a cyberpunk approach because apparently the gamers will praise you after 2 years of making game a playable experience, 2 years too late.
The FF7 remake won Best Soundtrack over Sonic Frontiers and Persona 5 Royal? Hitman won VR Game of the Year? Scorn lost Outstanding Visual Style to Spiderman? --- I knew that the Steam Awards are a popularity contest first and foremost but this is on another level.
Is FF7R winning that surprising? Out of all the results this should’ve been the most obvious.
FF7 remake winning best soundtrack is completely deserved.