Essentially. That category must have been a troll by the steam community.
Even today Skyrim is a better game than Starfield. It's the same formula Bethesda have been doing for 20 years now but they somehow managed to make the world feel more artificial and lifeless. And So. Many. Loading screens. 😔
Nothing against the core Bethesda formula - I still enjoy the whole "explore, run into shit, and spend the next 30 hours on side quests" - but they really need to focus on making a more rich and engaging experience.
It's innovative in that they looked at the resource scanning in ME3, settlements in FO4, and romance in practically any game that has romance, and they said, "let's put all of that in this game, but kind of pointless and more annoying to do." I actually enjoyed a lot of the game but I'm pretty sure people voting were either bots or trolls.
Remember that Stray (the game where you can meow and jump) won most innovative gameplay last year. The Steam Awards is purely a popularity contest, people just vote for the game they played for the badge.
Yeah. It's weird, almost all of these have some level of controversy. Starfield. Hogwarts Legacy and Rowling's transphobia controversies. There were attempted boycotts of Atomic Heart by Ukraine sympathizers for a variety of alleged reasons. Some lifelong fans of The Last of Us were reneging of the franchise after learning that its creator Neil Druckmann was inspired by Israel-Palestina to create TLOU and recently posted an Israel flag in his Instagram. There was controversy about Dave the Diver being considered an indie game by most casual people (and being nominated as such for awards) and further discussion about what's an indie. SIFU was criticized by journalists for negative portrayal of a foreign culture and briefly became a bit of a darling for online right-wingers that hate video game journalists. Even Baldur's Gate 3 was milked a bit as a darling by people that generally dislike current video game devs and accuse them of being lazy. I also even saw someone using solo-developed Lethal Company as a bludgeon against other developers. Only ones I don't remember seeing controversies about are Labyrinthine and Red Dead Redemption 2.
It almost feels like the classic coordinated troll-voting campaign by 4chan or whatever but those tend to have a right-wing bend and I don't know if they would've voted for Atomic Heart (I don't know if the would have voted BG3 either but I assume that one's kinda unstoppable). It's kind of weird because a couple years ago when Trump was praising Russia right-wing gamers might have voted for the Russia game to piss off liberals. But with the current wars there's a lot of right-wingers supporting Ukraine and Israel. So I don't know.
I mean, that sounds like a whole can of worms I don't wanna open. But I just meant the games definitely don't live up to their nominations, almost seems like some behind the scenes dealings going on
Look at the Steam news section for rdr2. They pushed out a few minor updates with timed bonuses for online play over the past year.
That's it.
Pretty sure Deep Rock or No Mans Sky has had more and more impactful updates