Nioh 2 snake demon boss artwork

With the great winter sale and the last round of voting finally concluded, Valve has now officially revealed the 2021 Steam Award winners! You can find the full list, all neatly sorted by category, over at the Steam Awards website.

Despite being a purely community-driven affair and thus liable to become a popularity contest, I'm very happy to say that this year's winners have been well chosen! Nioh 2 got recognized as a difficult but highly enjoyable game, the heavily co-op focused It Takes Two rightly secured the Better With Friends category, while the Labor of Love award went to Terraria and its never-ending stream of quality updates.

The only one I really disagree with is Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy winning the Best Soundtrack award. It's an amazing soundtrack, there's no denying that, but it heavily relies on already existing hits rather than entirely new music. Maybe this is just me, but that kind of feels like it's against the spirit of the competition.

That little nitpick aside, this has been a pretty good run for the Steam Awards, and I can only hope the next one will highlight yet another batch of diverse and interesting games. Until then, you can check out some of the previous years and see if there's any fun games you might want to dive into. Enjoy!