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Steam Winter Sale and Steam Awards voting begins today

by Mark Tyson on 20 December 2018, 12:11

Tags: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Valve

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The 12th annual Steam Winter Sale will open its virtual doors today. At the time of writing the Steam Store landing page hasn't been updated to reflect the opening of this annual sales event but it is still very early on the 20th Dec over in the US of A. Coinciding with the sale, Valve will start to accept voting on the various categories of the Steam Awards 2018.

A couple of days ago Valve previewed the Steam Awards 2018 by releasing the full list of voting categories and the nominees in each of the eight sections. I've reproduced the full list in tabular form below, so you can quickly see what you might be voting for.

Nominees for Game of the Year

  • PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
  • MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance
  • HITMAN 2
  • Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Nominees for VR Game of the Year

  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
  • VRChat
  • Beat Saber
  • Fallout 4 VR
  • SUPERHOT VR

Nominees for Labour of Love

  • Dota 2
  • Grand Theft Auto V
  • No Man's Sky
  • Path of Exile
  • Stardew Valley

Nominees for Best Environment

  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
  • Subnautica
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  • Far Cry 5
  • DARK SOULS III

Nominees for Better with Friends

  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
  • Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
  • PAYDAY 2
  • Dead by Daylight
  • Overcooked! 2

Nominees for Best Alternate History

  • Wolfeinstein II: The New Colossus
  • Assassin's Creed Odyssey
  • Hearts of Iron IV
  • Sid Meier's Civilization VI
  • Fallout 4

Nominees for Most Fun with a Machine

  • Euro Truck Simulator 2
  • Rocket League
  • NieR:Automata
  • Factorio
  • Space Engineers

Nominees for Best Developer

  • CD PROJEKT RED
  • Ubisoft
  • Bethesda
  • Rockstar Games
  • Digital Extremes Ltd.
  • Square Enix
  • Capcom
  • Paradox Interactive
  • BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment
  • Klei

 

You will notice that the Best Developer section has double the number of nominees and this is due to being so highly-contested, says Valve, which excluded itself from the list.

If you are interested in voting in the above awards, or checking out the initial sale offerings, check back with the Steam Store homepage later today.

PC-Steam and Xbox One cross-play

Earlier this week code-snoopers noticed that the latest Steam beta showed signs that "Valve and Microsoft are planning to improve cross-play between PCs and Xbox One consoles". Tom's Hardware reports that the Steam client code included Xbox-related networking features – making it easier for cross-play to be enabled in the future.

Microsoft has previously implemented initiatives to embrace cross-play so it isn't surprising to see this code in Valve's platform. I can't think of any negative impacts to Valve's Steam sales from this, so there should not be any commercial stumbling blocks here. However, we must remember that test features don't always make it to a general release of the Steam client.



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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Looking for a couple of reductions on some items this year but as they are fairly new releases may not see any at all.

Bit of a shame you can't vote for what you want though, a couple of categories I would have nominated something else.
Jonj1611
Looking for a couple of reductions on some items this year but as they are fairly new releases may not see any at all.

Bit of a shame you can't vote for what you want though, a couple of categories I would have nominated something else.
Nominations happened in one of the earlier (Halloween? Thanksgiving?) Sales.
Was that the nominations? Thought they were actual awards??? Oh well, guess the ones I nominated weren't good enough :)
A couple of my nominations made the list, but I am rooting the most for No Man's Sky winning labour of love, how they turned that game around this year is astonishing with no sign of them slowing down yet. If they don't win that I will be gutted.
Jonj1611
Was that the nominations? Thought they were actual awards??? Oh well, guess the ones I nominated weren't good enough :)
Same here.
I gave up when I found you couldn't nominate the same game for two different categories.