One of the main advertising gimmicks of tonight’s Game Awards was a promotion being run by Valve that would see a viewer win one of the company’s prized Steam Deck handhelds every minute.
As we reported last week, to be eligible you had to be watching the show on Valve’s own Steam.TV website:
As announced November 30, Valve is celebrating The Game Awards with a massive Steam Deck giveaway. The company will be giving out a free handheld PC to a single person every minute for the entire run of The Game Awards. (Never in history has someone wanted The Game Awards to run long, until now…) To have a chance, you’ll need to first register for the drawing, which you can do now, then watch The Game Awards via Valve’s Steam.TV website.
It was an odd promo for a number of reasons. Firstly, because as early as the first major award presentation the show was clearly running way over time, something even host Geoff Keighley had to acknowledge in relation to the giveaway. And secondly, because of who won.
During Christopher Judge’s acceptance speech, which, yes, did run long but was also incredibly emotional and heart-warming, the winners of Steam Decks started popping up. So while Judge was up there, pouring out his heart, the rest of us were witness to:
People who were either disappointed (a minority) or who found it incredibly funny (the majority) began tweeting their congratulations to Mr or Mrs Hunter, which led at one point to “Milf Hunter” becoming a trending topic in the United States across all of Twitter.
Given “Milf Hunter” is also the name of a porn outlet, and The Game Awards have almost zero cultural penetration outside this bubble, you can understand some people’s confusion:
I mean, it is definitely where that site is heading, don’t get me wrong. Just not tonight.
If you missed this, or any other Game Awards stuff, we’ve got you covered with this roundup, which includes everything from a Death Stranding 2 reveal, to a Hades 2 announcement, to Al Pacino.