Valve introduces Steam Awards with 2016 Autumn Sale

You can now purchase Steam games at a discount while nominating them for Steam Community awards.

Valve introduces Steam Awards with 2016 Autumn Sale

We all knew it was underway. You could feel it in the air. Now it's finally here - the traditional Steam Autumn Sale which discounts most of Steam's back catalogue for the Black Friday weekend. That said, Valve has a new plan to keep the occasion from becoming stale: It's introducing the Steam Awards.

The Steam Awards are a new service where Valve accepts and considers nominees as requested by the Steam Community. Users can suggest any game from Steam's library for consideration, and earn badges for the process. Valve will award badges for nominating games, playing games you've nominated, and even writing reviews (or updating previous reviews) for your nominees.

And there's no need to worry about picking games from 2016 either - as quickly becomes clear by looking at the categories.

• The "Test of Time" Award
• The “I'm Not Crying, There's Something In My Eye” Award
• The “Just 5 More Minutes” Award
• The “Whoooaaaaaaa, dude!” Award
• The “Villain Most In Need Of A Hug” Award
• The “Game Within A Game” Award
• The “I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award
• The “Best Use Of A Farm Animal” Award
• The "We Didn't Think of Everything" Award

By making each award category tongue-in-cheek, Valve can easily have a different selection every year - encouraging players to look at both classic and recent games as potential nominees. And once the winners are selected, we can likely expect additional discounts which generate more sales.

The Steam Autumn Sale itself runs until Nov. 29 at 10am PST, at which point nominations will presumably cease.