Are Steam media (avatars, profile backgrounds, banners, etc.) made in celebration of an event valid artifacts for game identification?

Question

I've recently posted a question: Which visual novels are represented by the animated avatars in the 2023 Steam Visual Novel Fest?

Timmy Jim ♦ has commented that:

I don't know if these .gifs qualify as a valid artifact. Tag guidance: Only ask if you have a screenshot, video, or audio clip from the game you want to identify (thus "from the game" isn't satisfied I feel here).

I admit that I'm not 100% sure if those Steam avatars are from video games. However, I have many reasons to believe that they are:

• They're given away by Steam in celebration of a visual novel fest, and visual novels are video games. Steam media (avatars, profile backgrounds, banners, etc.) made in celebration of events are usually/always of characters or things from the video games associated with the event, and
• It would be weird if they were just illustrations of a random bear, a dog, and people that are unrelated to video games.
• I've yet to see a Steam animated avatar (the ones given away in celebration of a Steam event) that has no relation to a video game.
• We have multiple well-received game identification questions asking about various Steam media, some of which, like in my question, were also made to promote certain events — Steam avatars, profile backgrounds, banners, etc. E.g., What character is this and what game is it from?, Who are all the characters / games represented in Steam's Humble Games Publisher Birthday Sale 2022 banner / picture?, Which game is this picture on the SteamOS announcement of?, What games are these Steam Indie Sale characters from?, What game is shown on this Steam 2021 Winter Sale thumbnail?, Find game which a Steam profile background is from?, What game is this Steam background from?.
  • Similar questions, but the media is not from Steam: Nintendo — What game is this character on Nintendo's eShop from?; Symbol on a t-shirt — What game is this symbol from?

According to the top-voted answer at the related meta post "Where do we stand on artifacts the asker believes are from a game?":

We should trust the question asker's belief that the artifact is from a game until proven otherwise.

I think the reasons I provided above are strong enough to support my belief that the artifacts are from video game(s). (If they aren’t, I have no problem being proved wrong in an answer.)

Are Steam media (avatars, profile backgrounds, banners, etc.) made in celebration of an event valid artifacts for game identification?

Answer 1

I propose that such question should be on-topic

Steam is a gaming distribution service, so it should fall in with topics like Xbox or PlayStation. It is also an accepted tag on the site, so questions about Steam are already considered on-topic.

Given what Steam is, and years of experience using Steam, the majority of artwork is related to various games. So, a user asking about an image from Steam would reasonably expect it to be related to some specific game or series.

While it's true that a small subset of Steam images are not related to a game, a question should not be judged by it's answer. If a user knows the image(s) asked about are not related to a game, they already know the answer to their question.