As 2020 comes to a close, Steam has finally announced its end of the year deals and opened up voting for the Steam Awards. The Steam Winter Sale offers discounts on thousands of games.
This year, Steam broke its record for the total number of nomination votes, having tens of millions of nominations from the Steam Autumn sale that ran earlier this year. Steam has narrowed down the games to just over forty titles, spread out across the ten different categories. Taking part in this year's vote will earn users a unique Winter Sale trading card for each vote cast, which players can add to their collection.
The Steam Winter Sale will run from December 22 to January 5 at 10 am PST. Voting for the Steam awards is only open until January 3 at 9 am PST, before the winners are announced.
Users are only allowed to cast one vote for each category, with five options each to choose from. The available categories for this year's Steam Awards are Game of The Year, VR Game of The Year, Labor of Love, Better With Friends, Most Innovative Gameplay, Outstanding Story Rich Game, Best Game You Suck At, Outstanding Visual Style, Best Soundtrack, and Sit Back And Relax. The categories have a mix of AAA titles, as well as smaller indie developed games to make things more interesting. Some of the titles that have earned nominations are Hades, Doom Eternal, Among Us, and Red Dead Redemption 2, though there are plenty of others too.
For the Winter Sale, many of the games on steam are offered with hefty discounts, each ranging from 20% to 80% off. Titles such as Control, Raft, and The Witcher 3 are included on the list of thousands of discounted titles as well. The Winter Sale even offers discounted deals on entire franchises, such as DragonBall, Star Wars, and Resident Evil.
Other features that are included for the winter update involve new reaction features for Steam chat, as users can now use animated reactions to reply to friends' messages. The new chat functionality is available for the desktop, web, and mobile versions of Steam chat. There are also new bird holiday stickers that are inspired by a popular game on Steam, for those looking to spice things up in that regard. Users can collect the free bird sticker in the points shop every other day during the sale. Hopefully, gamers can use this sale to collect some games on either a friend's or their own wishlist.