When Valve first announced The Steam Game Festival – the event which would eventually become Steam Next Fest – it was an answer to the damage wrought on exhibiting developers by the pandemic. Launched in June 2020, the Festival was billed to developers as "an opportunity to get early feedback from players and build an audience for future releases." That remains true today, even as Next Fest has grown into an industry-spanning event that Valve rolls out multiple times a year – but it's more true for some games than others.
Some of the biggest games of the latest Next Fest were games I'd never heard of. Dungeonborne topped charts throughout the week, filling the gap left by fantasy extraction game Dark and Darker, which isn't available on Steam due to legal restrictions; my personal highlight was Backpack Battles, an autobattler built around the same inventory management ideas as cult roguelike Backpack Hero; Soulmask and Dread Dawn borrowed some from the best survival games to spend much of the week hovering around the top ten. That's an expansive list of excellent up-and-comers, but their presence was halted by the impact of some genuine juggernauts.
Steam Next Fest splits its charts into three, to give different measurements of a game's popularity. The 'Trending Upcoming' chart borrows from Steam's nebulous ranking systems, while the 'Most Wishlists' and 'Active Daily Players' charts speak for themselves. That gives different kinds of games different ways to succeed, and helps show where other players' are spending their time and (theoretically) their money. Those charts all shift organically over the week thanks to word of mouth or players simply finishing up what's on offer, but they remain the best way of finding the best demos in the show. Getting an early lead at the top of any of them can extrapolate outwards into a lot of extra attention – Enshrouded, one of last month's survival hits, dominated the October 2023 Fest, and has gone on to sell more than a million copies in its opening month.
Real-time marketing strategy
And that leads me to my issue with this recent Next Fest. As soon as the first demos went live, a collection of three games found themselves squatting atop those charts. One of them was Pacific Drive, another upcoming survival game. The debut effort from developer from Ironwood Interactive, it's easily the least problematic of these three juggernauts, but it was catapulted to renown thanks to its reveal on one of the biggest stages in games, during Sony's September 2022 State of Play. Gearing up for release, Pacific Drive is in many ways a perfect contender for Steam Next Fest, but it can't be denied that it was one of the more famous games going into the festival.
Dwarfing Pacific Drive, however, were two real-time strategy games with serious pedigree. One of them was Homeworld 3, the latest offering in a series that has spanned 25 years, two sequels, a remaster, and a spin-off prequel. The Homeworld series' history is a convoluted one, and developer Blackbird Interactive hasn't always been at the helm, but it's safe to say that this isn't an underdog, and its presence towards the top of the Next Fest charts struck me as even more galling when the game suffered a three-month delay while its demo was live.
Even Homeworld 3, however, pales in comparison to the real big stack bully: Stormgate. A new IP from a new studio, it's not as though this strategy game doesn't deserve a spot at Next Fest, but this is no simple RTS. Stormgate is the RTS successor to the biggest-ever games in the genre, hailing from a team of Warcraft and StarCraft veterans. And that heritage is only part of the equation – Stormgate recently raised $2 million through a Kickstarter campaign that hit every stretch goal and saw the game knocking on the door of some of the biggest gaming crowdfunding efforts ever. That's an impressive feat, but it was undermined somewhat by the revelation that Stormgate was already fully-funded before its Kickstarter began.
All of these games are entitled to market themselves however they like, and it's sensible to take advantage of this rare opportunity for free game testing outside the core audience. But I can't help but feel like there's a touch of cheesing the system at play here. Homeworld 3 and Stormgate are successors to some of the most beloved, successful games in this genre, and as a result have had plenty of press in the run-up to their release. All of that attention is the kind of thing to contribute directly to healthy pre-release wishlists, which then place these games right at the top of the Next Fest charts before those charts have even formed. This time round, it took days for the dust to settle to allow other demos to bubble up organically. As Steam Next Fest becomes an increasingly key part of the pre-release efforts for a growing number of games, we're likely to see bigger games feature more regularly, but that shouldn't come at the expense of games that actually need the discoverability that Next Fest was designed to offer.
