We’re now fully into game awards season, with The Game Awards 2025 announcing their nominees and the Golden Joystick Awards already handing out their hardware. If you’ve been feeling that your favorite game has been left out in the dark so far, here’s your chance to give it the spotlight it deserves. With the Steam Awards, you can nominate your choices from now until December 1, 2025, at 10:00 AM Pacific (1:00 PM Eastern). Users will then be able to vote for the finalists during the Steam Winter Sale, which we already know runs from December 18 to January 5. However, the winners for this year’s Steam Awards will be announced on January 3 at 10:00 AM Pacific (1:00 PM Eastern).
To prevent nomination abuse and botting, nominations are only open to non-limited Steam accounts. Also, the Labor of Love category works differently from all the other categories, as it’s intended for games that have been around long enough to have shown lots of development love. Steam is setting that at roughly a year or so, meaning all games that released prior to last year’s autumn sale are eligible. The only exceptions are previous years’ winners, which include Warframe, Grand Theft Auto V, Counter-Strike 2, Terraria, Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Elden Ring.
Those who participate in the nominations will also receive badges on Steam. Currently, there are four tasks:
- Nominate at least 1 game
- Nominate a game in each category
- Play a game you’ve nominated
- Review (or update your review) for a game you’ve nominated
Each level of the badge gives an additional 25 XP, and clicking the button to skip a category will count toward your badge.
Users can nominate games for the following categories:
- Game of the Year Award
- VR Game of the Year Award
- Labor of Love Award
- Best Game on Steam Deck Award
- Better With Friends Award
- Outstanding Visual Style Award
- Most Innovative Gameplay Award
- Best Game You Suck At Award
- Best Soundtrack Award
- Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award
- Sit Back and Relax Award
