Game of the Year Award - Baldur’s Gate 3
VR Game of the Year Award - Labyrinthine
Labor of Love Award - Red Dead Redemption 2
Best Game on Steam Deck Award - Hogwarts Legacy
Better With Friends Award - Lethal Company
Outstanding Visual Style Award - Atomic Heart
Most Innovative Gameplay Award - Starfield
Best Game You Suck At Award - SIFU
Best Soundtrack Award - The Last of Us Part I
Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award - Baldur’s Gate 3
Sit Back and Relax Award - Dave the Diver
They really had Starfield competing for “most innovative” with nothing but smaller indie titles that most people probably haven’t played. No wonder it won, it looks like Valve practically guaranteed them the award.
The biggest other game on that category was Remnant 2, a fantastic game that improves on everything the previous iteration did but isn’t really innovative since it’s a sequel.
The votes make no sense.
I agree with you, but how many people do you think played Remnant 2 vs played Starfield? Unfortunately part of these game awards, at least for ones that players vote for, is the popularity aspect. People will vote even if they only know 1 or 2 of the nominees, so a game’s popularity ends up being a huge advantage.
So in this case Starfield, for some bizarre reason, got stacked up with a bunch of indies with significantly smaller player bases. So despite Starfield having no right to win the award, it did.
It really feels like it was purposefully pit against those games to give it a free award. I can’t think of any other explanation.
Edit: Some people are speculating that people voted for it as a joke, and did the same for RDR2 winning “Labor of Love” despite having no new content since release. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true.
Remnant 2 was far more innovative than Starfield. The biggest innovation of Starfield was to get the game to even run on their crappy engine.
Or being one of the few games that require you having an SSD to run properly lol.
Agreed, Starfield is basically just Skyrim but no open world. It’s a shame that Remnant 1 was not nominated a few years back though.