How to win at Steam Next Fest (2025 data)

Steam NextFest. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. I'm Chris Sukowski. I'm from how to market a game.com and I and I teach people how to do Nextfest. Um, let's do it. Let's get into it. All right. So, I ran a survey where I got hundreds, literally 200 people, 200 people plus to submit their data about how well they did in NextFest. And this is how you get wish list on Steam, folks. Nextfest is there. Okay. This is all the results. Every bar is a game that submitted their data. Okay. Now, there were games that did super well. I call them diamond tier games. They did so so so so so well. Uh we're talking tens of thousands of wish lists, sometimes 45,000 wish lists, and then their gold games, silver, and bronze. It really depends the whole gamut. Okay? And this is possible. I talked to the people who did this diamond stuff. These are normal people. I've talked to them. They're cool people, but they're normal people. All right? This is what you can expect to do when you enter nextfest. Okay, if you're

diamond tier, these are my tiers, by the way. I made these tiers up. Um, we're looking at about 10,000 wish lists. Uh, gold tier is like 7,000 up to 10,000. Uh, silver is a,000 to 7,000 and bronze is under a thousand. Okay, I surveyed hundreds of games. I figured out what it takes to get up into those diamond and gold. In this video, I'm going to teach you how to get up there. That's what we're talking about. How to get this diamond and gold. That's what I want for you. It's what I want for your game. Let's do it. This is This is how to do Nextfest. This whole video talking about how to get into NextFest and how to do it right. Be diamond. All right. Everybody wants to be diamond. That again, this is this is the talk. I almost called this how to be diamond, but then people are like, "What is he? Some sort of weird weird salesman or something?" All right. This is how you do it. Okay. This is the secrets. I'm going straight into this video to help engagement so people don't drop off. This is how you do it. I'm telling the answers right now. Okay, you got to make a good game, not a bad one. If you're thinking, "Maybe I should make a bad game." Don't do it. Only make a good game. Okay, I'll talk about it. Uh,

release your demo long before NextFest. Don't debut it during NextFest. Okay? Get at least 2,000 wish list before you get into NextFest. Do a separate demo page for your game. Don't put it on the same page, and I'll talk about that. Market hard for the first two days of NextFest. Do push it as hard as you can. Okay? Maybe do some paid ads. Maybe it's not necessary. It's not for everybody, but it might help. And then please, folks, in addition to making a good game. Don't make your own capsule art. Just don't. You're not good enough. You're just not. Just maturing in life is realizing you can't make your own capsule art. Okay? So, hire somebody. Hire somebody. Hire somebody. Okay? So, let's do it. I'm gonna now from here on out, I'm going to answer these questions. I'm going to give you the details because people are going to be in there. This is not I'm going to tell you exactly how to do all that stuff. Okay? That's what the rest of this video is for about. Okay. Now, YouTube sucks, everybody. YouTube sucks. There's not enough information. I can't like talking does not transmit real data. You've got

to think about it. You got to concentrate on it. The full report for this thing is how to marketame.com. Um, go to the blog post February nextfest. I give you all the data, the whole write up. You can do it on your own pace. YouTube sucks because you can't sit with the data. It's me blabbing blah blah blah blah. You can't stop, think, process. That's why YouTube sucks. People don't subscribe to my channel. Don't. YouTube sucks. Okay. Anyway, so the full thing, read. Reading's cool, kids. So, read the report on how tomarketame.com. All right. So, speaking of sucking on uh YouTube sucking, let's go into it. All right. What's NextFest? It's three times a year, okay? Every three every four months they run it. So, it's February, June, October, sometime in there. They kind of change the dates a little bit within there, but they do it these months. Okay? That's when they do NextFest. Valve runs it. It's a front page takeover. you want to be in it, but you can only do it one time. Uh, you can't game the system one time only. One time only. And in addition to that, you h can't have released your game. And yes, that counts for early access to

your game basically can't be for sale. If you're accepting money, if your game is currently accepting money, it's off limits for DexFest. Only for games that are unreleased. Okay. All right. Only thing. Now, I was talking to some guy at GDC about this and he's like, "Well, I I I don't want to release my demo yet and you have to release it with NextFest." No, no, that's not a rule. You could release your demo months and months and months and months months and months before NextFest. It doesn't matter. You don't have to launch your demo as part of NextFest. In fact, it's better if you launch your demo months and months and months and months and months and months before NextFest. In fact, this is the number one rule. Do not launch your demo as part of Next Test. you nextfest is the last of it. It's the end of your game. It is just before you go to launch. You should be launching your demo months, maybe years before NextFest. Okay, number one rule. Don't do that. Okay, so let's go through it. Let me give you the full details. Even though I did the TLDDR, I gave you all the answers. You could run with it. You don't have all the context. You probably

don't believe me. And the rest of this video is me convincing you why you need to listen to me. All right, that's the way it goes. All right, so here's the number one thing. Just make a good game. All right. Again, if you're like, "Guys, are we gonna make a good game or a bad game?" Don't do the bad game. Only make the good ones. Okay? And if your if your game's bad, ship it and make a good one and then make a if that one's bad, ship another one that's good. Okay? Just Just make a good one. It just I keep telling people and they don't listen to me. Just make a good game. All right? Uh let me let me explain why I'm not just making this. So, the way Steam NextFest works, here it is. The first two days they're like, "We don't care. We have no rules. Everybody gets visibility." They do. They give everybody visibility. And uh in my survey, I asked people, "How much visibility? How many impressions did the Steam NextFest page, just the page, not YouTube, not a thing, how much did the Steam NextFest page give you?" This is called impressions, and report that data to me.

And then I grouped the data into those tiers. So, in other words, like, oh, we got 7,000 wish lists. That put you in gold territory. So, I grouped all those and I medianed them. Get the median of all the gold games. And I said, day one, how many impressions did Steam give them? And you'll notice, here's the deal. Steam block this. Just ignore everything from how do I do this? Everything. Ignore all this stuff. All this stuff. Ignore all that data. Just look at this front this day one, which is February 24th. You will notice that bronze and silver games all got right around this 15,000 impressions thereabouts. Okay, both games did these kind of gold and diamond they both got right around this 4 thou 40,000 50,000 somewhere right in here. Okay, and then day two Valve's like, "Let's give you even more more impressions." So, everybody got more impressions. See, everybody everybody gets it. Everybody gets a new impressions. Valve's like, "We don't

know what's a good game. You tell us customers." And then the Steam shoppers like either ignored them or wishlisted them or clicked on it, played the demo. I don't know what it is. It's a machine learning algorithm. Valve told me, they were like, "It's a machine learning algorithm. Who knows? It's just some sort of robot that comes up with these things. Some robot god that decides our fate." Well, whatever machine learning data inputs, it makes a decision on the third day. So, here's the third day. Okay. February 26th. This is real data. This is from real games. Um, the bronze games, the games that didn't make any wish list. Valve's like, the machine god, the AI super god is just like, nope, not these games. Hide them. Let's give them fewer impressions. These games about the same. See, they're like, you're doing okay. And then there are these set of games, the diamond games, where the machine god was like, oh, you are awesome. And then the Valve algorithm gave them all the visibility. Even by day two, they're

like, "We know already this game's awesome. Everybody's playing it. Everybody likes it. Everybody's doing everything good for this game. It's awesome." So, this is why I'm like, "Please guys, everybody watching this, make a good game. These are the good games and these are games that I'm not they're not bad games, okay? They're not. It's just Valve is like the machine god is like looking at what games people really engage with. And so by the end of the the next fest, the really, you know, like people are always worried of shovelware. The shovelware games get dumped and hidden by Steam Nexfest. That's what this is. This is all this is all getting stuffed by the machine learning algorithm. It's like people don't like shovelware. Steam players are very smart and they know. That's what it is. Okay. I also I went through all the games that were in the bronze tier that submitted data and I was like a lot of these capsules don't look like they were made by professionals. It was like a screenshot of the game and then somebody went into MS Paint and typed the title of their game. Don't do that. Hire a capsule artist. Please, folks. Please. I could see it. I just looking at the games, I could tell if they're bronze tier. Just hire capsule. It's going to

cost you money. But if you're doing this and you want to at least make your money back, hire a capsule. It's worth it. It's worth it. Please do it. Okay. Um, gold and silver, they kind of dance around here, but really it's the diamond games. The diamond games are where it's at. Okay. Um Okay. So, the the second rule of doing well and how to get into the gold and diamond tiers, okay? You want to get your demo out way before NextFest. Way before. Next fest is not where you should launch your demo. So many people I've seen, they're like, "My demo's not ready. I got a got a bad review from Steam when I tried to submit it and they rejected my demo. I don't know if I can make it in time for next." It's like, don't stress yourself out. You should be having your demo live like now if you're going to be entering into the next year's NextFest. You've got to get that demo up long before because demos are actually how you get visibility, folks. It's not Twitter. It's not Reddit. Those kind of work for like one type of game that are like super beautiful. For most games, they get their visibility when they launch a

demo. And here's the deal. To do well in Nexfest, you have to already have wish list. This is the secret, folks. You already have to be doing well. Okay? And the way you do well, the way you get a lot of wish list going in is you have a demo live so that streamers can play it and you can enter into other festivals. Here's what I did was I went down and I looked how many wish lists because I asked people how many wish lists did you have before NextFest and then also how many you got. And you'll notice if you went in with about less than a thousand wish lists, you were always bronze tier. Nobody with fewer This is the best person that I saw that was in bronze tier. Not bronze tier. The best person who came in, the best game that came in with a thousand wish lists or less generated 4,000 wish list. Now, that's good. That is really good. But they never made it to gold or diamond tier. Nobody got out of it. Okay? Nobody like escaped their social class is what I could say. Basically, whatever you went into NextFest with determined what you

came out of NextFest. Notice these games that have a 100,000 wish lists coming into NextFest all did fantastic. No matter which way I slice the data, whether I did average, median, 30th percentile, 70th percentile, um the number one game, every single game that went in with 100,000 came out with a diamond tears worth of wish lists. Basically, what this this chart, again, go to the website to really dig deep into this data. Basically, whatever you came in with, the number of wish lists you came into NextFest with just determined what you were going to do. Okay, that's just what it is. You have to come in with wish list. You can't just like say, "Hey, we're thinking of just, you know, kind of just testing out whether people like our game. We want to get momentum by jumping into NextFest. Let's kick off our marketing campaign with Nexfest." No, that is a mistake. That is a mistake. Let me show you why. Okay, 2,000 wish list. This is kind of my my gut feel. You need at least 2,000 wish lists before you do NextFest. And let me let me let me show you. Now, this is a

chart that I made and I I graphed them on two different axes. I did a splatter chart or a scatter chart. I like the term splatter better. Uh because it looks like somebody sneezed on the data. It's like, sorry for your ears if I just sneezed in your ear. Anyway, um so here's it is uh total wish list that you earned. So the the higher up you go, the more wish list you earned in NextFest. And then um the bottom the x- axis is the number of wish lists that you had before next. Okay. All right. Now you'll notice it just starts going up and up and up and up. I should actually do it this way. Like this way. Here's zero wish list. These are the games some there was a game that came in with 10 wish lists and it got basically zero wish list. Okay. You don't don't be this don't do this. Okay. You want to come into next test with as many wish lists because the more wish list you have, the further you are along this chart, the further you come over here, the greater your possibility. Okay? And I was just like eyeballing. This is total eyeball.

I didn't run an R2 regression or anything like that. I just eyeballed it. It kind of seems like a line. Like after you cross into this red zone, then the action starts happening. This is where you can actually kind of drift up into the zone. You want to be these games. Okay? You you want to be these boys right up there. You want to be this. This is good. This is all right. You see, you notice a couple popped up here, but this is where the action really happens. You can just see the energy. And this is logarithmic. This is logarithmic scale. Don't forget logarithmic. So, I could squeeze them in. Um, this line 2,000 wish list. It just seems like after about 2,000 wish lists, Steam NextFest just shows you. Now, I don't think this is a line. Valve in their algorithms never just has like a straight up line in their algorithm where it's like if 2,000 give visibility. That's not true. What I think it is is when you get to about 2,000 wish lists, you are way advanced, way ahead of all these other games and you start showing up in more of the trending charts, like if you go drill down into a couple genres, you're probably at the top of the charts with 2,000. You're very competitive at least

at 2,00. So, what you want to do is you want to get at least 2,000 wish list before before you get in next vest because you just have more there's just more energy. Look, it's just just eyeballing it. Look, you're not scraping the bottom here. You're just it's just it's effervescent. You want to be effervescent. Okay? Everybody should be more effervescent. All right? Uh this is just my break to remind you that YouTube sucks. Don't subscribe to my channel. Just don't. Like if you did unsubscribe, okay? And you want to go here how toarketame.com/free because I give you a book. I give you a a freaking book. I mean, it's digital, but still it's a book and it's 60 game marketing mistakes. You don't get that when you hit the subscribe button on YouTube because YouTube freaking sucks. Anyway, that commercial is just to remind you how much YouTube sucks and you should not subscribe to my channel. You should join my mailing list, how tomarketing.comfree. All right, number four, separate demo page. There's a big question people always ask me. Should I do a separate demo page? Because when you upload your demo, it says, do you want to put this demo on your main page

or do you want us to generate a secondary page where you put your demo? It doesn't matter, folks. It doesn't matter. I asked everybody, did you do separate or the same? And it was straight down the middle. 50/50. It's like a coin flip. Half the world goes, "Yes, I want separate." Half the world goes, "No, on the same page." Okay, but it doesn't matter. I I slice the data, the median. I I don't think I actually provided that chart. You got to go to how toarketame.com to see the actual data. Uh because I broke it down by median uh average. It it it basically comes out in a wash. Look at these charts. They're basically the same demo on the same page. Demo on a separate page. It doesn't matter. But the my answer to you is you should always do the demo on a separate page because you get reviews and you need to get feedback from the users. I talked to so many indies and they're like, "Oh, everybody loves my game. I talked to my brother. He loves my game. My mom loves my game." It's like, that's not feedback. That's just like people who are nice to you. You need to hear feedback from people who hate you. Okay? I know it sucks. You didn't want to do this. You thought it

was all going to be candy and roses when you made video games, but it's not. You got to hear, you got to get the thorns from the roses, okay? And you get that by doing a separate demo pages which allows rando users on the internet to yell at you. I know it sucks. It does, but you need to hear this. I I actually am very impressed with Steam user reviews. They're very perceptive and you really hear it and you need to fix your game based on what these weirdos on the internet tell you. Okay? They're just like those people down in the comments that are like complaining about stupid stuff. YouTube comments are just just as bad. They're actually kind of worse. Um, but Steam shoppers are very perceptive and so you need to get those reviews so that you can fix your game. It's better to hear the bad news now on your demo because you can fix it. And if it really turns bad, I don't know, something somebody's like really homophobic or something, you can always just undo it and you remove your demo page and all the reviews just vanish. Like all those bad mistakes you made in life, what if you could just push a button and they just vanish? You can do that on Steam.

All your mistakes just vanish. And that can happen with a separate demo page. Not your life choices. Those stick with you forever. But your Steam demo reviews just vanish when you undo that page. So if it turns bad, undo it. Take away your life. Okay, let's go to the next one. Number five. Market hard on day one and two. Um, this is just I also had comments like, "Hey, how'd you market?" Everybody who did very well pushed really hard day one and day two. Remember how I said the algorithm steam algorithm gives you free visibility and then the machine God lord our God amen was just looking at whatever happens the first two days and then whatever happened these first two days it then decides what you should do. You want to push hard so that our machine god lord overlord amen says yes yes yes. Um that's what you wanted to do. If you don't push hard, there's an option. There might be that you get shoveled

into the death zone or even silver tier. I I would not I silver is not great. It's okay. It's okay, but I'd still rather be gold or diamond tier. And so, if you push hard on day one and two with all your marketing, and that's lining up streamers, possibly running ads, possibly if your game's good. If you ma if you if you made your own capsule, don't run ads. Pay that money to capsule maker, okay? because capsules show how good you are at making games. It's It shouldn't matter, but it does. So, when you push these hard on these first two days, it really it can it can influence the God our Lord. Amen. Okay. So, um number six, don't freak out. Nobody plays demos. Okay. If you Valve at the end of the festival, Valve will give you data about how many people actually played your demo. And it turns out it's not many. Most people will play your demo and then go. That just happens. It just happens. Everybody, here's the stats. Again, these are all the tiers.

Even the diamond people, only 30% of people played the demo and said, "Yes, I want this game." Wish list. Most, if you look, most people, this is across all even the even the best games, most people just say like, "Yeah, they're just scanning through NextFest and they're like, "Yeah, it looks good." Wish list. wish list. Do you want to play the demo? Nah, I'm just I'm just gonna wishlist it. I'll buy it later. That's okay. That is totally fine. People get freaked out by this number. I get emails all the time. They're like, "Look, these are most games. Diamond Tier is like special gods." Even most games, it it averages out. I did it. It averages out to about 17% if you average these three numbers. This is the number of people who played and wish listed is very low. It's actually very rare for somebody to play the game and be like, "Yeah, I had a great time playing this demo." Boom. wish list. It's very rare. Most people just wish list. They just do. And this causes people's brains to explode, developers brains to explode. They're like, "Well, if the majority of people are not playing it, like 80% of people

wishlist it without playing my demo, why did I spend so much time making this demo?" It's counterintuitive. And this is the internet. This is how the internet works. Most of what you do is not seen. But the act of uploading a demo gets you into NextFest. Uploading a demo gets you streamers to play the game, which tells people about the game. Most people don't even play it, but they wouldn't know about it without the demo. So, even though most people don't play the demo, you still have to make a demo. I'm promising you the people, if you didn't make a demo, this number would be zero. Not 15, not 17, not 32, it would be zero because nobody would hear about your game. You have to make a demo so that influencers and very influential people play wishlist and then tell their friends, "Hey, this game is awesome. You need to wishlist it." And then the friends go, "Okay, my friend's really good at games and really knows games. I will wishlist it based on their recommendation." And they wishlist it.

They don't play the demo. They don't They just wishlist it. That's the thing. The median of wish lists of people who just didn't even play it, didn't even play the demo, just wishlisted on just just blind faith is way high. Look at that. 15,000 versus almost 5,000 people who played it and were like, "H, I don't want it." 4,000 people played gold or diamond tier games and were like, "Yeah, I don't want it." And this game's great. These games, games that are a diamond tier are probably going to make millions of dollars. Okay? And even then, even these million-dollar games, people like me, I'm not gonna buy it. And they just didn't wish list. That's that is video games, folks. That is how the internet works. It's it's a huge funnel of just thousands and thousands of people and 90% of them are going to me, but the most potent games are like 10%, 20%. That's it. It's a very slim percentage. Okay? So, just don't forget about the numbers. These are totally normal. I show these numbers so that people know, oh, not many people actually play in

wish list and that's normal. Relax. Don't freak out. Okay. Um, and this is an interesting fact. This comes from Game Discover Co. Um, this is kind of related. They looked at how many people who've bought a game have actually played it. And the majority of people will buy a game. It's like 51% and never play it. That's just Steam. Steam is a fan base that is very love games. They love the identification of I'm a gamer. And so they'll buy games because they want to say, "I bought that game. I loved it. Did you play it?" No, but I love the the idea of the game and I love the idea so much I'm going to spend money on it, but I won't even play it because I got other things to do. That's what people do. They buy games anticipating to play it, but they never do. Again, half of libraries, the median, the median Steam user has only played less than half of their library. The blue is played games. They have a library of 51% of games they've never even never even turned on. They threw good money at it and they never played it. That's the way Steam works. That's the way. So, they don't play your demos.

They don't play your games, but they throw money at you. That's what why you pay Steam 30% because you can sell games to people who don't even buy don't even play them. Isn't that amazing? All right. Again, don't make a bad game, make a good one. That's I'm just going to repeat it. Um again, I'm just looking at the data here. This is um the play. So, again, back to this chart. Even though I say most people don't even play the game, they just wish list it. I see the data where it's like, and I'm sorry if you made a bronze game. If if you midday and you got bronze, I'm not saying you have a bad game, but I'm just saying like you can see it in the data. People only wish games. Even though I said don't freak out, still 17%. You could just see it in the data. Like a diamond tier game is so freaking good. These are good games. You could just see it in the data that people play it and they go, "Yes, I need to wish list. I need to buy this." Diamond tier games are just they're like magic. They've just tapped into it. And it's hard to make a diamond tier game. It is.

I'm not I know I'm joking about make a good game. Don't make a bad game. I'm I'm joking. Don't don't comment below. But what I'm saying is you just have to get good at making games, okay? And it takes a long time and you have to make multiple games and you have to have multiple failures before you make a good one. It just just know that. Okay, folks. This is a hard business. And you can just see it in the data. Everywhere I look in the data, these Diamond Tier games, they just they're like twice. They're like double the visibility. They're double the play time, double the everything. They are just like at a genetic level superior. They are the super race of video games. Okay. All right. Let's let's keep going here. All right. Paid ads. Uh this is actually I'm going to go through a small case study of the game that won NextFest in my data. So, do no harm got the most wish lists of all the survey data. They got about 45,000 wish lists. And I'm going to do a small case study, very small, because I the developer, I talked to him a little bit. One of the the developers, they were on the team. It's a team of people. Um, this is the biggest um Steam

NextFest game. I'm going to show you a little case study. This is not representative. I know it's survivorship bias. I know. But sometimes you just need to see how people did it. Okay? It's good. It's good sometimes just get a nice um what do they call it? case study or qualitative data. Before I do, how automarket.comfree. YouTube sucks. Don't subscribe. If you did, since the last time I told you not to subscribe, you subscribed again. Stop it. Stop it. Don't subscribe to my YouTube channel. This is what I want you to do. How to marketame.comfree. YouTube sucks. All right. So, let's go to this case study. So, here it is. Do not harm. Do no harm. They did what I said. They went into NextFest already having 52,000 wish list before NextFest. Okay. and NextFest during it. They won. They won. They got 45,000 wish lists in basically like a week and a half. That's how long Nextfest is. Week and a few days. That's how much they earned during NextFest. They won. They got the most wish list in my survey than anybody there. I think there were a couple games got more than them, but they weren't in my survey. This is the number one game. It's called

Do Not Do No Harm. Okay. One. This is a good game. This is a good game. Look at that. Look at this guy. That thing's gross. Uh but it's a good game. It is. Um you look at reviews, people like it. Here, here it is. Good game. If you look at the things, look, this this guy, he bought it in like in less than a month, the guy's already racked in 20 hours worth of gameplay. Steam players like long games. You have to have hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of content because that's just how long people like to play these games. Okay, this game has lots of content. It's a simulation game. This guy said it's a medical simulator. People like to simulate. They like to pretend they're a different thing. That's a top genre simulation games and it's horror. Look, they said this is a horror game. So really good game, right genre, good graphics, horror, simulation, deep systematic gameplay that gets 20our play times, long play times. This is the type of game Steam players like. Play this game. Buy it. See what type of games

players like. It's not a game where you run around with a dude with a sword. That's it's it's these like crafty buildy strategy simulationy games and horror the dark. This is the type of game Steam likes. Okay. But anyway, that's why I talked to the developer and this how did you do this? This is what I asked the developer. I said how did you do it? And they said all overall up to January 29th when we released our announcement trailer on game trailers and didn't did okay. So, one, way before NextFest, they launched a trailer on this game trailers. It It did good there. I mean, they said not good, but it did good. Comparatively, you want to go out with a big trailer. Don't just put your game out there, folks. You got to make a trailer and you got to go tell somebody with a big audience like game trailers does say, "Here's my trailer." And because they have a good-looking horror game, fans on the internet love horror games that look good. And they watch the trailer and they go, "That looks good. I'm going to wishlist it. Okay. And then they did PR that that

means just they reached out to the press and influencers and they had a demo going live on February 4th. Now if you remember February 27th was 23rd 2 long time weeks before NextFest they had that demo out. The demo is what kicks it off and then we started seeing nice results. Okay. You don't get wish list even if your game looks awesome. You don't get wish list until you have a demo folks. You just don't. You have to get the demo out. That's the thing. It's not posting on Reddit. It's not posting on YouTube or Tik Tok and all that stuff. It's It's a demo. So, get that demo out. Okay? And you got to do it long before NextFest. I would have even done it longer. I bet they could have even done better. I mean, they won NextFest, but they would have done it on uh if they had done it like let's say January 4th. I bet they would have even done better. But, I know development's hard. It's hard to get a demo out. But again, you don't really start getting wish lists until you get your demo. See, we saw nice results after they got the demo and they did the PR and the

trailer. That's what it takes, folks. Get that demo out. Just get it. Okay. And then um they didn't say I didn't have an actual quote notice. It's not in the quotes, but they were also like, "Oh yeah, we ran some ads." We don't know how much that helped. And I don't know how much it helped either. It's kind of once you start throwing ads, it gets really confusing when data comes in. But um they did do their heavy like ad push on those first two days. And then the overlord AI god was like, "This looks good." I don't know why the AI god's like, "And then the numbers just went up from there." That's that's what it takes, folks. That's how you do Steam Nextfest. And then finally, don't freak out about NextFest. Here's the deal, folks. It isn't even the best thing. Uh the reason we all talk about NextFest and the reason I do surveys is because everybody asks me, "How do I do NextFest?" And the reason everybody asks about NextFest is because everybody is entitled to NextFest. There's no question. Everybody gets in. You You don't get rejected for NextFest. Everybody gets in and Valve will actually send out an email that says

like, "Do you want to join NextFest?" And then because of that, that prompts people to go, "Oh, I should do NextFest. Let me ask Chris how do I do NextFest?" And then I have to do a survey. It's I I talk a lot about NextFest, not because it's the best thing. It's just because people ask me about it. The best thing is actually other festivals. Okay? Other festivals will actually earn you more than NextFest. Okay? That's the truth. That's the truth, folks. Other festivals that are smaller because this next vest was like I think it was 3,000. It was like 2,500 games were in this nexus. That's huge. Your game is so crowded out. There are other festivals that have like 500 games. 200 games. There are smaller festivals where you will get more wish lists. I promise you. Next isn't the best thing, but you have to work for it. See, NextFest just comes to your door and like, "Do you want to join?" And so people everybody can get in. Got you. you're in nextfest. There are other festivals. The festivals that are smaller get you more wish lists you have to apply for. And here's the deal. Don't subscribe to YouTube. Don't subscribe to my YouTube. When you go to

how toarketame.com free, I give you every week an email free. This is free. That's why I said free. Every week I tell you the festivals. My community tracks festivals. See this is I literally screenshot my last email that I sent out on Monday. The very bottom I list all the festivals that are accepting submissions. And I see that date, that's the deadline. You can just do these now, but if you join the newsletter, you can click this and then you get the the link and it goes right to the registration form. This is where you really get wish list. Next, these are like super next fests because some of these festivals like um let's see, cerebral puzzle showcase. If you're making a puzzle game, it's nothing but puzzle games. And so puzzle game fans are really browsing this. You are, if you get into this showcase, you're going to get so many wish lists, let me tell you. But you're making a puzzle game. You are going to get so many puzzle game wish lists, which aren't any people don't like puzzle games. I'm sorry. Um, but see all these like if you're making a martial arts game, hey, there's a martial arts festival. Hey, you just submit it. Okay, if you can kick a dude in your game, submit. All right, so all

these festivals do much better. And you only get them if you join me at how tomarketingame.comfree. I send it out every week. I tell you what they are, and I say go here's a festival. These are the ones that really get you. They're like so much better than Exist. Okay, so that's it. That's it. Don't subscribe to my YouTube. Don't do this one. Do that. How toarket.comfree. Chris here signing off. Um, if you submitted your data, I just want to say thank you so much because your data helps us understand how these crazy algorithms work. You're the reason I can do what I do. So, thank you for submitting your data if you did. If you didn't and you're going to do the next festival, next next festival, submit your data then. I do surveys all the time to make sure that the algorithm is still working the way I think it does and that what the data is telling us and that's what it is. So, good luck on your game. This is going to be the last YouTube you watch today. Just close it because you have a demo to make. Remember how I said you got to get that demo out now? Now's the time. If you're watching If you're watching YouTube, you're not making a demo. So, close this YouTube video. Close it. Just you're done with YouTube. Don't watch another video. There's going to be a suggestion because that's how

the YouTube algorithm gets you that AI overlord. The AI overlord teaches you that you have to watch another video. Don't. You tell that AI overlord, say, "My brain's in charge, not you." And then you know what? You take charge and you close this browser window. Close it. Get working on your demo. Take charge of the AI overlord and tell them, "I don't want to just keep hitting my dopamine levels. I need to make my own choices, not you, AI overlord. I'm shutting this down.