The 2019 Steam Awards are looking for nominees

But I’m mostly here for the art

What’s the best video game of 2019 that you suck at? I bet you have an answer ready to go.

That’s one of the questions at the center of the Steam Awards, an annual community-centric ceremony meant to highlight the best and brightest PC games of the year. For 2019, Steam has eight categories:

• The Game of the Year Award
• The VR Game of the Year Award
• The Labor of Love Award
• The Better With Friends Award
• The Most Innovative Gameplay Award
• The Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award
• The Best Game You Suck At Award
• The Outstanding Visual Style Award

Once you’re logged into your Steam account, you’ll be able to nominate games that released after November 27, 2018. A couple of caveats: there’s no release-date restriction for the Labor of Love award, so anything goes, and you can only nominate an individual game once. If you end up having a change of heart, don’t worry about flip-flopping – you can edit your nominees after the fact.

There’s also a new Steam Awards badge with tasks to encourage people to leave a review. As you fill out the to-do list, you’ll earn 25XP each step of the way. (Do we still care about Steam XP?)

The award nomination process ends on December 3, 2019, at 10:00am PT, after which point Valve will reveal the finalists during the Steam Holiday Sale. Then, at long last, we’ll see the winners on Dec. 31.

I also can’t forget about an underappreciated aspect of the Steam Awards: the art! You can find all of the category artwork in the gallery at the bottom of this article. The VR wallpaper broke my mind.

As for that original question: I’m thinking Hunt: Showdown. Cool game, but I’m miserable at it. I like these nontraditional categories as a way to give exposure to games that aren’t necessarily “the best.”

_{[Image credit: Olly Moss]}