The Winners of the third annual Steam Awards have been revealed by Valve over on the Steam blog.
Each year Valve Corp. hosts a community vote on the best game of the year on the ubiquitous PC game store. In addition to choosing the game of the year, Steam users get to vote on a series of ever-evolving other categories. This year’s list of categories includes, Game of the Year, VR Game of the Year, Labor of Love, Better With Friends, Most Innovative Gameplay, Outstanding Story-Rich Game of the Year, Best Game You Suck At, and finally Outstanding Visual Style.
Most of this year’s categories are fairly self-explanatory with the exception of Labor of Love which is the Steam Awards category for what is sometimes called Live Games or Service Games. Games that weren’t released this year but never-the-less were still being played a lot this year because their developers were continuously adding content throughout the year.
Here are the winners if the Steam Awards as chosen by the community:
Game of the Year
VR Game of the Year
- Beat Saber
Labor Of Love
Better With Friends
- DayZ
Most Innovative Gameplay
- My Friend Pedro
Outstanding Story Rich Game of the Year
- A Plague Tale: Innocence
Best Game You Suck At
- Mortal Kombat 11
Outstanding Visual Style
- Gris
And these were some of the games in contention that came close but didn’t quite make the cut:
Game of the Year
- Resident Evil 2
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
- Destiny 2
VR Game of the Year
- Blade & Sorcery
- Gorn
- Borderlands 2 VR
- Five Nights At Freddy’s: Help Wanted
Labor of Love
- Warframe
- Rainbow Six: Siege
- Counter Strike: Global Offensive
- DOTA 2
Better With Friends
- Risk of Rain 2
- DOTA Underlords
- Age of Empires 2
- Ring of Elysium
Most Innovative Gameplay
- Baba is You
- Slay the Spire
- Oxygen Not Included
- Planet Zoo
Outstanding Story-Rich Game of the Year
- Disco Elysium
- Farcry New Dawn
- Gears 5
- GreedFall
- Best Game You Suck At
Mordhau
- Code Vein
- Hunt
- Remnant From the Ashes
Outstanding Visual Style
- Total War: Three Kingdoms
- Astroneer
- Katana Zero
- Subnautica: Below Zero
Baba is You got robbed in that Most Innovative Gameplay category if you ask me.
Stephen Krusel, known as Sven Kroosl to some, has played video and tabletop games since 1987 and has written about the gaming industry since 2008. He has yet to be convinced that Final Fantasy Tactics is not the pinnacle of gaming.
