The biggest strategy game in Steam Next Fest is a medieval siege MMO from cult devs - but it's impossible to play it most the time and I have to wait 5 hours to get in

The biggest strategy game at Steam Next Fest is an MMO from devs I've long-admired. The problem is, as I'm writing this, I've still got to wait four hours before I can actually play their game.

According to Valve's own Steam Next Fest charts, the biggest strategy game on the books in the June 2025 Fest is Anvil Empires. Currently topping the daily players chart and at second place in the wishlist charts, it's certainly an early success story. Given its pedigree, however, that's not a surprise - Anvil Empires comes from Siege Camp, best known as developers of Foxhole, a cult warfare MMO in which logistics are just as important as combat.

A chance to combine Foxhole's player-driven narratives with my favorite part of any strategy game - turtling inside my base while wave after wave of enemies smashes themselves against my defenses - meant that Anvil Empire was one of the first Steam Next Fest demos I downloaded. But when I went to play it for the first time, I was pretty sorely disappointed.

On the Steam Next Fest page, Anvil Empires appears like any other demo. It's only once you visit its page or start installing it that you learn you're actually getting access to its "massive battle stress test." That meant that the first time I opened it, the demo told me I'd need to come back in about five hours if I wanted to play, because that would be the next time that the stress test was actually active.

For the record, I probably will be back. And I also think that what Siege Camp has done here is pretty smart - using the kind of influx of players that a successful Next Fest can bring in is a really smart way to make sure your stress test does actually push the servers as far as they can go. But I've also never seen anything quite like this in several years of covering these demos - with so many titles vying for attention, turning players away seems like the exact opposite of what you'd want to do.

There's clearly a science to this, and it seems to be paying off. One bonus of making sure that all your players have to show up at the same time is that it almost guarantees you a spot high up on the Top Demos charts. And Next Fest is a much simpler way of bringing new faces to your MMO's server tests than a complex marketing campaign. But I can't help but feel slightly stung by Anvil Empires, even if I am still counting down the minutes until the next test launches.

I guess I'll pore over our list of the best strategy games while I wait.