That's why it's stupid to give incentives to people to vote. I hadn't even heard of 90% of the games up for selection in the awards. But I sure as hell voted on every one, usually just picking a game I'd heard the name of, or one with a cool looking banner.
This right here is the exact reason Starfield won most innovative, and the same reason Hogwarts Legacy won best on Steam Deck. People who hadn't played any of the games in the votes only voted on games they had heard of.
It was weird voting for a best on steam deck without owning a steam deck. Seems like it would have been easy to restrict that one to accounts that have been used on a deck. Same with the VR game vote
This would cause other problems too. People will mostly vote for more popular games because more people own them… Realistically I don’t think there’s a way to do this that would actually be meaningful. In general I’ve started to place an extreme amount of distrust in ratings for games and movies because realistically I don’t care what the average person thinks of a piece of media… I care what I think, and aggregate measures like that don’t really give you a good impression of that. It seems more useful to find good curators and people with similar tastes (or tastes you understand so you can say “oh they liked this, but I don’t like that kind of stuff as much as them” or “oh they didn’t like this, but that stuff is more my jam than theirs”.