Steam’s fan-fueled 2023 game awards have been decided, and players are shocked, amused, and just a little bit outraged at a certain result.
On Jan. 2, Steam announced the winners of their yearly award poll, for which the nominees and winners are all determined by Steam user voting. There are 11 categories, one of which is Most Innovative Gameplay. This year, Starfield took home that innovative gameplay award from Steam, and Reddit is not holding back while expressing their thoughts on the outcome.
You gotta give it to Bethesda. No one before figured out how you can put so many loading screens into a single game. It probably has best LSPM ( Loading screen per minute ) in history of gaming.
-u/SheroxXx on Reddit
Scour the comment section of the announcement on Starfield‘s Reddit page, and you aren’t likely to find even a single comment that supports the decision—however, it goes even further than that.
Several different commenters are theorizing that Steam users voted for Starfield as an active trolling maneuver, and one person even openly admitted to voting for Starfield “as a shitpost.” What’s interesting is that these comments aren’t even being left by people who despise the game. A very large portion of the comments lead in with a statement about enjoying the game and then end with an agreement that they too think this must have been done as a meme.
Of course, there is one very real possible other alternative, and that is player count. At the end of the day, Steam Awards are nothing more than a fun and jovial popularity contest, as the winners are determined simply by the total amount of votes received. This means that a wildly innovative indie game that may see success at The Game Awards isn’t very likely to even be nominated on Steam, as outreach is the most important thing on Steam’s community-based award metric.
With that said, Starfield‘s player count has been on a steady decline over the four months that the game has been out. Combine the fact that it’s no longer in Steam’s top 100 most played games with the fact that it’s sporting a Mostly Negative recent review rating, and it starts to seem far fetched to say that the people who voted for Starfield were active players who genuinely found the game more innovative than the competition. Indeed, the more likely explanation may be that this win for Starfield is truly just the result of trolls doing what they do best.
I personally neglected to vote for this year’s Steam Awards, but I must admit…t he idea of voting for Starfield as the winner for Most Innovative Gameplay does sound pretty hilarious to me, regardless of the game’s plans for 2024.
