Sunsetting the Community Choice Award
- Community
- Steam
It’s with some sadness that, today, we’re announcing the end of the Community Choice Award. We’ll get to talking about the “why” a little later in the blog post, but first, we wanted to highlight some numbers and important moments over the award’s 3-year history!
Originally started back in 2023 to both recognise the community’s excellent track makers, and show off their incredible achievements to both players and non-players alike, the Community Choice Award has been a great source of high-quality - often unique - tracks. Back when we had only tens or hundreds of tracks in the Steam Workshop, the Community Choice Award was a great way to highlight the tracks that were pushing the early boundaries of track-making, and inspire other players to create their own masterpieces, too!
Fast forward to today, and we have a little under 1200 tracks in the Steam Workshop (with more being added regularly) - the number of excellent tracks grows all the time. We’ve had 34 Community Choice Awards, handed out medals to 102 different tracks, by 26 different creators.
Just some of the many CCA-awarded tracks!
So Why End It?
The primary reason is because we want to move the function that the Community Choice Award has been filling, directly into the game. With the upcoming UI improvements, and update to multiplayer, we are wanting to make finding tracks to race easier - and not force players to have to leave the game, head to Steam Workshop, and download their tracks separately. This won’t happen immediately, but we want to be sure that you can find the current popular and most-downloaded tracks directly in the in-game menus.
In addition to this, engagement with the blog posts, and subscriptions to the CCA Workshop collection, are on a downward trend, even whilst subscriptions to tracks and submissions have continued to rise over time (with some fluctuations here and there). Further, Steam has continued to de-prioritise track collections in the Workshop UI, making the collection itself less discoverable. With all this in mind, we believe that the award (at least in this current format) is coming to its natural conclusion for now.
In Closing
Overall, a huge congratulations to the many Community Choice Award winners over the course of the competition, and our deepest “thank you” to everyone who submitted tracks either with the hopes of winning, or just for the joy of sharing your creations with others. The development team have played the vast majority of all the tracks submitted in the Workshop, and it’s been a truly amazing experience! We look forward to many more user-created tracks in the future ✨
Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the Community Choice Award Winners collection on the Steam Workshop, and get all of the winning tracks added to your track collection at once!