A few hours ago, Valve closed the Steam Awards 2023 polls to announce the winners in each of the ten categories. Unsurprisingly, Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 brought home another Game of the Year award after the previous wins at the Golden Joystick and The Game Awards, beating finalists Resident Evil 4, EA Sports FC 24, Lethal Company (the runaway early access smash hit of the last couple of months), and Hogwarts Legacy.
Avalanche Software's best-selling game of the year did win a prize here, though. Hogwarts Legacy was voted 'Best Game on Steam Deck', beating Diablo IV, Brotato, Dredge, and The Outlast Trials in this category.
Lethal Company also won an award. The indie cooperative horror game made by Zeekerss received the most votes in the Better With Friends category, surpassing Sons of the Forest, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Party Animals, and Sunkenland.
Oh, by the way, Baldur's Gate 3 was the only game to win two categories at the Steam Awards 2023. Larian's excellent cRPG also brought home the prize for the Outstanding Story-Rich Game, beating fellow finalists Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Lies of P, and Love Is All Around.
Interestingly, Bethesda's sci-fi RPG Starfield came out on top in the Most Innovative Gameplay category, ahead of Remnant 2, Shadows of Doubt, Your Only Move Is HUSTLE, and Contraband Police. This is peculiar because the game's average user reviews on Steam are now mostly negative, in direct contradiction with this community vote. Clearly, a different group of players participated in the Steam Awards 2023 voting for this category.
Another controversial prize was the Labor of Love award, which was handed to Red Dead Redemption 2. Even the game's own fans questioned it, though, since Rockstar Games pretty much abandoned most of the support for the game in July 2022 to focus entirely on Grand Theft Auto. Anyway, RDR2 topped a shortlist that featured games like Dota 2, Apex Legends, Rust, and Deep Rock Galactic.
The remaining winners include The Last of Us Part I for the Best Soundtrack (beating Hi-Fi Rush, Persona 5 Tactica, Chants of Sennaar, and Pizza Tower), Dave the Diver for the Sit Back and Relax award (against finalists Cities: Skylines II, Coral Island, Potion Craft, and Train Sim World 4), Sifu for the Best Game You Suck at award (in a shortlist that also included Street Fighter 6, Lords of the Fallen, EA Sports FC 24, and Overwatch 2), and Atomic Heart, which received the Outstanding Visual Style prize by getting more votes than High On Life, Darkest Dungeon II, Cocoon, and Inward).
Last but not least, the Virtual Reality Game of the Year for the Steam Awards 2023 went to Labyrinthine, a cooperative horror game by Valko Game Studios. The finalists were F1 23, Ghosts of Tabor, Gorilla Tag, and I Expect You To Die 3: Cog in the Machine.
