Every winter holiday season, Steam holds the Steam Awards. It's a chance to recognize your favorite games for their achievements. However, as Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out, because these awards rely on public voting, they often end up rewarding mainstream games backed by enormous marketing power rather than some indie gems that do equally impressive things yet dont enjoy the mass media attention. In the past, we used to actively promote the awards within our Liftoff community. However, we soon realised that we were pressuring you, our community, to participate in a system that couldn't truly recognise the unique and niche games you loved. To illustrate this sentiment, this year's results are raising eyebrows among gamers and game press alike. Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that hasn't received any significant updates in the past 2 years, has been awarded the "Labor of Love" award. While it is a fantastic game deserving of much praise (we love it), it seems ironic that, as far as the gaming community is concerned, it is an abandoned project. The huge Rockstar fanbase however shows strength in numbers, simply voting for their favorite game. So rather than just celebrating the popular vote alone, well also reveal our special consideration for the 2023 Labor of Love Award: our community! Together, our virtual pilots have achieved the milestone of logging over 10 million total flight hours in Liftoff. Nearly a decade after its initial release, they've consistently set new records in growth and playtime. In 2023, their dedication resulted in over 3,700 custom community-made pieces of content, contributing to the more than 27,000 workshop items collectively shared over the years, freely available for any other Liftoff pilot to use. They've shared 11,000 virtual drones online and crafted hundreds of kilometers of virtual drone racetracks to fly them on. For us, this signifies an incredible labor of love, and we deeply appreciate our community for it!
To the thousands of new pilots that joined us the past few days. Please be welcome! Join our community on Discord and Facebook!