As Steam Next Fest gets bigger and more crowded with free demos, these developers are still finding wins: "It's kind of early access for Early Access"

"It's the first time we've ever launched something on Steam first, so that, in itself, was quite a… feeling," says Reanimal producer and Tarsier Studios co-founder Andreas Johnsson, pausing slightly as he recalls Reanimal's Steam Next Fest demo in October of last year. "I was going to say positive feeling!"

"Fans weren't super happy at times, were they?" chuckles Dave Mervik. Historically a PlayStation-first studio, a Reanimal demo for PS5 launched weeks after my chat – but for Steam Next Fest, the team threw themselves into the PC experience, inviting fans to check out their first horror adventure since leaving behind Little Nightmares. In our Reanimal review, we called it "a feast of twisted weirdness".

Steam Next Fest's roots began in 2020, when quarantine uncertainty led to the necessary cancellation of in-person events and Steam kicked off its Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition – loaded with demos to bring the future of gaming into the hands of players at home.

Rebranding as Steam Next Fest, it's become a regular fixture in the gaming calendar, now running three times a year (usually February, June, and October). Serving a massive amount of demos with a mix of randomness and user-based algorithms, the event updates throughout its weeklong run to spotlight certain games and make it clear which ones are surfacing across multiple charts. All of which you can find out about in our own Steam Next Fest guide, too.

Steam itself sees a tremendous number of game releases that grows each year, with 20,282 games released in 2025. There are valid fears around what it takes to stand out in a marketplace as daunting as that. Likewise, as more successes have come from Steam Next Fest, demo season helping to put games on the map through wishlists and other attention, participation has swelled – Steam Next Fest October 2025 had almost 3000 demos. But, even with such a packed crowd, for developers that are able to find wins through the event it can make a huge difference.

Big dreams

Even with a different franchise, Tarsier Studios has a dedicated fanbase eager to see its next project, but that didn't stop the team being anxious about testing that. "It was quite nerve wracking the day before and the day when the demo was released, and being [...] potentially highlighted during an event like Steam Next Fest," shares Johnsson. "But it was extremely fun to see the reactions from the game."

It's a completely different environment to showcasing a game to press at an event like Gamescom. "[That's] kind of cozy, because a bunch of people come in, and you get that nice energy from people, and you're sitting with them, and you can kind of laugh along with them if something goes wrong, or explain, contextualize stuff," says Mervik.

"Here, it's kind of like you press go, and then [stressed grunt] They've got it now, and they can think what they think with no input from us. So, for me, it was still quite unexpected when the positive reactions to it started to come in, and we were like 'Fuck man, this feels quite nice!'"

Despite some flaws, which Johnsson describes as "performance issues" and "bugs", he was surprised that they were taken in good stride by players as part of the early look. "I just love those comments that we read where, you know, 'I had this issue here and the issue there, but I don't mind. It's still good.' Oh, OK!"

From watching streamers play it to hoovering up comments, it was a positive experience for the team. "It does give you that blast of energy, just when you need it most [...] It could have blown up in our faces if the demo had been received shit. And we were like, 'Oh, let's finish it anyway," says Mervik. "But instead [...] You get a bit of wind in your sails, like: All right, come on, then! You almost now have to deliver more because people really love this. We've got to nail it!"

New school

For a team like Mango Factory, though, preparing to release its debut game Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter, there's no built in fanbase to lean on. Unashamedly inspired by Danganronpa, Kumitantei, according to creative director Selina Kibara, was "100% a fan game" in early development. Even so, it's not easy to stand out from the crowd.

The road to launch has been a tough one, fueled by passion and the dedication to community engagement. "The Kumitantei team does a really great job of Fan Art Fridays," says Fae Monique, marketing lead for Kumitantei at Akupara Games. But to encourage fan art, people need to actually see or play the game enough to become a fan in the first place. Akupara Games has only come on board recently, as Kumitantei was still set to be self-published when I played it back during the Steam Next Fest in June 2025 (and spoke to the team towards the end of last year).

"On our side, getting a lot of press and new followers off of Steam Next Fest certainly, I think, helped boost the morale on the team to keep looking for a publisher," says Kibara. "Since we had been through so many rejections at this point we had kind of decided that we're probably going to have to launch Episode One just solo and see how it goes."

Kibara approximates that from our own Kumitantei preview, it got approximately "1500 wishlists", which can be vital for a smaller indie release. Kibara notes how funny it is that, so far, its biggest bits of press coverage haven't been tied to any specific press releases.

For my part, I simply scrolled through hundreds of games served up to be during Steam Next Fest, wishlisting and downloading what interested me and trying to prioritize playing what grabbed me the most – and Kumitantei was near the top. In that respect, something must be working, but I do personally spend an above average amount of time combing through storefronts because it's a part of my job. As ever, discoverability through the algorithm, or positive word of mouth, can be a challenge. Still, while the result is I just get to play a cool demo for free, for developers like Mango Factory it can be the difference between getting enough resources to finish your game or not.

"The incredible response that we got from the Next Fest demo really pushed us to keep looking and trying to find the right group to work with us on this, because we really wanted our game to have a home and to be able to be alongside other similar games in a catalog. That's something that was really important to us," says Kibara. Akupara Games has also published the likes of Cryptmaster, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, and Sorry, We're Closed – putting Kumitantei in very good company. "Coming off of Steam Next Fest and into our publisher agreement – I imagine that the wishlist count certainly helped – but the biggest thing on our side was just being able to prove that we had something here that was worth paying attention to and worth investing in," says Kibara.

"I'm a little more removed from the numbers side of the pitching, to be completely honest. But when we're considering games, we obviously do look at your wishlist count, interest that you've gotten," says Monique.

It's not just Steam Next Fest that's benefitted Mango Factory. Kumitantei also featured in the earlier Storyteller's Festival in 2024 when "it had no voice acting at all," Kibara tells me, which is what put it on VO director Mia Paige's radar – leading to a collaboration that now sees the mystery game fully voiced by incredible talent. Crowded though Steam may be, it can still put you in the right place to be seen by the right people, and whether that's a potential player, collaborator, or publisher, that seemingly small thing can have a huge impact.

That's something that Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender certainly agrees with. The publisher has done very well from getting momentum on Steam, with the upcoming Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era becoming the number one demo on Steam during October 2025's Steam Next Fest and quickly breaking one million wishlists. Speaking shortly after that achievement, he tells us that "Steam is a wonderful platform that is engineered to show players things that they like, no matter how narrow or wide their interests are. It's amazing how advanced Steam is for that purpose."

Horsing around

For the developers at Unfrozen working on Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, the success has given them the space to roll up their sleeves and engage with their audience ahead of the proper Early Access launch. "It's kind of early access for Early Access," laughs CEO Denis Fedorov, who we spoke with for our Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era Big Preview last year. Launched during Steam Next Fest, the demo that became a sensation is still live, and has even received a few updates itself.

"We knew for sure that the game is good [from] our internal tests," says Fedorov. "But from the beginning, we decided, well, we will just give the players the game. [...] In the current market, you should be honest with the people. You should be fair with people, and you should show [them] respect."

Despite the confidence in Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, director and lead designer Leonid Parmenov said the team "didn't expect that much attention" from the demo. "During Steam Next Fast we collected an enormous amount of feedback from the players," he says, echoing Fedorov's comments on the early release. "In a way, we could call it like the beginning of early access because it was the first time when we could test all our theories and hypotheses, and to see how the players react to them."

The wishlists have been important, but for Unfrozen it's really the community engagement that's been so important from Steam Next Fest. That's included feedback it didn't predict, and has actually altered the priority of some tweaks ahead of full Early Access. While PvP multiplayer has been important, getting new opinions from PvE solo players has been hugely important.

"The game has been in development already for a long time, and during these years the way we see the project began getting a bit blurry," says Parmenov. "This kind of public demo helps us to have a fresh view on the project, to hear new opinions from new people, and to polish the game and make it actually enjoyable."

Steam Next Fest has grown, showcasing more demos than ever, and likewise each year Steam hosts even more games in its marketplace. But Bender believes that pure numbers aren't the best way to look at it. "There's often those headlines like, 'Oh, steam has this many games that came out this year,' and everyone's like, 'Oh, there's so many games – you can get buried.' The truth is, that number isn't very significant in terms of understanding what's going on on Steam. [It's about] whether good games are getting surfaced and identified for people, and whether the platform allows them to be discovered by the people who love them."

That, according to Bender, is exactly what Steam is best at. "The platform knows what it's doing. Its algorithms work well," he says. While he acknowledges it's true that the growing number of releases includes an increasing amount of solid games, he notes that "the gaming audience is growing" alongside it. Across regions, and especially in Japan he notes, "If anything, I think it means there's more opportunities to be discovered by them. We constantly see how even small teams that weren't necessarily predicted to be the big hit, or had all the attention, they're still able to succeed huge on Steam when their game is out there, and it really delivers for a group of the audience."

"Steam is so good at showing players what they want, and it's also so good at allowing games to be surprise hits and succeed. It's so good at allowing a game that's catching traction to go to that audience, and sometimes that's being shown to the niche audience that will really love it, and sometimes that means allowing this unknown game to be shown to everyone, because everyone's loving it," says Bender. "It's so good at doing that, that I think it fights through the general problem of getting it out there. It's an amazing discoverability tool for games."

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