Next Fest First Impressions (February 2026)

Hey, it's Chris here. Glasses mode. It's late. It's like uh it's 10:08 my time. Uh I wanted to pop in because I like to do the first day of NextFest to catch a a recording of what is going on in NextFest for posterity reasons. So I be like, did that change from last year? Was that different from this year versus last year? And it's 10 p.m. So that's an full 12 hours of NextFest that we've done at this time. It's late. I'm kind of tired. I'm going to be a little loopy. I'm not really a night person. I'm a morning person. I like to get up just punch something right in the right when I wake up. So that's the way to be a morning person. Morning people are always awesome. So uh if you want to be awesome, become a morning person. Uh so don't expect much as a night person because I am not that. It's going to be loopy. Now, what I like to do is just go through this and just record what's going on because I always go like next f the next next fest. I'm like, was that there last time or not? I'm also just

going to record a couple of like what's going on on the page. Um, this year I am scraping these charts, this trending free popular upcoming top demos, 100 of each one of those, the top 100 games every single day of Nexfest automatically because I'd always forget and then I'd have to do it and I couldn't search and sort. So, I'm doing that this year so I can just kind of relax and just let it flow. So, let's go through. I'm going to actually start with home. I was I was at the charts because everybody cares about the charts. Those are the top games. Now, if you're in NextFest, congratulations. Welcome to NextFest. Um, let me explain a little something here. People always get this wrong. The first two days, gates are open. You're going to see some weird games. Now, people always say that they always get the wording wrong on this. They think Steam says every day is equal visibility. Why do I even have to mark it? It's not equal with visibility. Okay? It's equal baseline visibility. So Steam will guarantee

like on this first day every game that games that have like zero wish list will get displayed here like in these things. Um that means equal floor. Think of it as an equal floor. There are games that show up in these charts that have a ton of wish list coming in and they get a lot of extra visibility because of this because of this chart right here. And because of these charts, these games get so much more visibility even on day one than anybody else. So what Steam's doing is these first two days they're running machine algorithms. They're doing like see this discover next fest and stuff. Um those they're just trying a bunch of games to see which one has a higher clickthrough or something. They don't even say what Valve doesn't even know what their machine algorithm is like prioritizing. They just like people seem to like this. Uh, so those first two days and I think they even say it at the bottom here. Yeah. Um, uh, kicks off with a sorted randomly.

There it is. This is the very bottom of the next fest. Uh, Steam uses it to learn with the first few days of the fest to better recommend games to players from Wednesday onward. No period here. They didn't put the period. No punctuation. The the AI didn't put a little dot right at the end. But um so basically what they're doing is they're opening it up and if they see a game outperform everybody else, they'll start moving it up higher on the charts on Wednesday. So we're going to do another stream on Wednesday just to see what comes through. Um but people always say, "What do I even need to market?" Because every game gets equal visibility. Uh uh uhuh. Everybody gets the baseline of visibility. But if you brought visibility, but if you brought in more traffic, um you could end up on those charts. Or if you had 100 wish 100,000 wish lists going in in XFest, you're going to get a lot more. So, it's not purely equal. They people on this Reddit always get this wrong. It's equal baseline visibility. You're guaranteed a very bottom kind of like a UBI if you're really into that kind of weird stuff like uh universal basic income. That's kind of what it is. You get a baseline of visibility on the first two days and

if you do well with those, they'll give you a little bit more. So, let's just go through enough tug algorithms. I'm just going to kind of click through what what I see. Uh first, I'm going to go laterally and then I'll go deep. So, because last I rewatched the one from last year that I recorded and I didn't do a great job of recording what's going on on NextFest because I'm I'm really interested in keeping track of it. So, I'm just looking at the widgets. So, we've got home and they've got these little intros. Same as last time. Discover NextFest. This is some of that randomness that I'm talking about where they just randomly put stuff in here. That's what this that's what this thing is all about right here. It's just just picking random games from there and seeing how the algorithm treats them. like somebody goes, "Oh, I want to do that or I got to push this wish list button." This wish list button like this up at the top. Um is how a lot of people interact. And so Steam sees a lot of this, a lot of this, a lot of clicking that in the map machine algorithm will bump it up a little bit more. So you see this widget, same as last time on your wish list, you see this kind of stuff. So this is why it's good to This is just

my personal wish list. I'm logged in. Uh this is why it's good to have a lot of wish list going in because sometimes you're probably going to get displayed a little bit more than you would otherwise um because of past wish lists and all that kind of stuff and just it's hard to explain exactly the correlation between having a lot of wish list going next and that but I just think seeing this stuff and then you're playing it and then your friends will see oh he's playing codeex mortise that's cool and so that increases your visibility and then there's recommended for you here seems I nobody explains what this recommendation is about. Again, it could be similar tags, that sort of thing, or visibility, uh, popularity. Um, a lot of these seem I saw these on the top trending charts, so this could just be popular games. We don't know. Again, not B. Everybody doesn't get equal visibility. It's some of these hot games get a little bit more than everybody else. Um, Discovery Q. I will go through Discovery Q. that was there last time. Um because I've been playing narrative games because it's important to stay up

to date playing a lot of games that do well otherwise. Immersive games. These are like the last two genres I've been playing a lot of show up more often here. And then this is just the random list. The other thing I'm going to point out is if I clear out these filters, um match to me 3,458 games. People always freak out about this. I went back to the last stats. So, in February or actually no, the last one I did was October. The very last Nexfest where I recorded this was October 2025. That that one had 2,884. And the one before that, October 2024, October 24 had 2,650. That means since the last Nexfest, there are 574 more. So it is increasing. So um Steam NextFest is increasing at an increasing rate of

the number of games that participate. Now is that bad? I don't forget about this stuff. Of course I'm not got a game for sale. Um my thought is the understanding of how the next fest meta works is getting better. So a lot of people are um understanding like oh I do nextfest and then I launch my game so that's better. Um, so people may have never participated in NextFest. There are a lot of games where like what's nextfest? I think the word of NextFest is getting out somewhere developers are putting their game in. Um, I think that maybe with the friends I'm saying this is a golden age, not a gold rush. I'm saying this is a golden age where faster, smaller games are are more popular with the audience of Steam players. And so devs that are smart are making smaller, shorter games. So that also increases the number of games coming out. So that's kind of the stuff I'm seeing. Okay, let's keep going. Uh, I'm going to go for for you. The next one over. Again, I'm just trying to record the widgets so that when I come back later, like in a year, I can remember what it is. Um, we got recommended trailers. This was another interesting thing. They

introduced this one a couple uh next festivals ago where they just show a random trailer. Um, again, you can wishlist and install demo or click on it. Again, this is why you cannot rely on click-through rate. People are always obsessed. If you have next game, you're probably obsessed like, is my clickthrough rate good? Is it bad? It doesn't matter because people come in through so many waves. See, if I wish list this, your wish list rate goes up, but your clickthrough rate is on the floor because nobody looked at your Steam page. You bypass that. If you install the demo, you again bypass the wish list and the install demo. And what we've found in the past is the number of people who install a demo and never wish list it is very high. That's the primary thing that people do. Very few people the next most popular thing to do is just to wishlist the game. And then the the the middle is they played it and they wish listed. That's the smallest sliver of those three options. So you can't predict based on clickthrough rate. Please, I know you probably worked in software. You probably worked on e-commerce or something. You have to take that part of your brain, throw it away because it doesn't work that way on

Steam. There's so many entry points. If they stream your game, they're going to search for your game. You're going to bypass all this next fest stuff because content creators is a big thing. Um, and so you got to bypass all that stuff. So, don't freak out about clickthrough rate cuz it doesn't matter. There's too many ways that people can interact with your game that doesn't involve looking at your Steam page. Okay. Um, again, for you is just kind of like based on tags I've been playing, wishlisting. They make a prediction of it. Again, you see this immersive games, narrative games, tags I've recently played. They try and figure this out. Who made this one? Kind of looks like No, I thought it was maybe um a Cozy Bee. That's a short one. Let's go back up. Let's go by genre. The interesting thing that I saw this one and I was trying to go back and research to see what I found and I didn't record it. That's why I'm recording it this time. What are the genres? Explore NextFest by genre. I wanted to see what they had before. I swear in the past they would stop here.

It was action adventure, strategy, simulation, RPG, puzzle, sports, racing, platformer. I swear those were the last genres. And I feel like they may have added visual novel, idler, and rhythm and music for this next fest. Somebody, if you have an old screenshot, you could share with me because I don't have one. I didn't take a picture of this. I feel like they added some more genres. And what are the genres that I'm always writing about? Visual novel and idler are the top most popular. Like narrative games and idler were the top genres last year. Some of the most. I wonder if Valve's like, "Yeah, Chris said old Chris said that these are the top genres. Let's pop those tags in there. So, I thought that was very interesting that they had these genres. So, I think they're doing it like these are the most popular genres. A lot of pe people who are very invested in Steam play a lot. Top of person who's going to play games on Steam NextFest. They really like idlers and this. I would be totally convinced that they're reading my stuff and making visual changes. if they had popped the horror tag in there. I'm a little disappointed horror is in there

because the top two genres with most played games over a thousand reviews in 2025 were narrative and horror. Okay, I don't see horror up here. Let's scroll down. See if we can see some horror. Yeah, let's see. Third person, arcade, shoot them up. All weird genres, but I don't see action survival. I don't see any horror. Let's see if I can do the control horror. No, it's not even in there. Okay, just interesting. Just doing it. Maybe horror is a theme. Maybe they consider it horror theme. Um, and there's horror. So, maybe that's why they're doing it. And then they do 2D casual, 3D casual. What a weird theme. 2D casual. 3D casual. I don't know. Um, okay. Space sci-fi. Good. Spaceship ass right there. Orbital. Good job. Spaceship ass. Backward. Spatial. Spaceship ass. That's really like you don't really see it really. Zachoid, spin that ship around. You got to you

got to show it from the back. That's that's what the fans want. They want to see the spaceship from the back. So the thrusters shooting right at him. See whatever this game is. Terrible font. I can't read it. Nebula Veil. Nebula Veil. Spaceship pass. Orbital spaceship ass. Zeoid. You can improve it. I like how this guy's like this that cowboy's like you show me your spaceship pass like shoot and this guy's like no I'm out of here. All right. Um sci-fi. Okay. I'm just looking to see what it is. It reaches. We got the horror stuff. So it is there. Maybe they just consider that a um a thing. Who made this one? This Spider. This looks like it's from I always like to see what the developers see if I can guess who it is based on the art. I know they're already working on a game. kind of looks like um I don't know I can't remember the name of them but this other studio that I think they're based out of South Africa they do kind of an art style like that but it's not okay by feature multiplayer VR Mac this is such a weird thing this

why I do this multiplayer VR Mac remote play together um okay just generally I'm just trying to trying to record remote play together and then you got your your list here Okay, we're going to keep going. Charts. We're going to go deep dive on this one. And then live streams. Um, this is where they have this chart. One thing that I'm curious about, look at all these games. The top ones. See, this is why you can't have equal visibility because like this game is getting a lot. So, it's getting it compounds its visibility because because it got a lot of visibility. It's now showing a lot of visibility which increases the visibility which it's it gets this positive loop. Uh, the interesting thing is only 1,400. I remember back when you could schedule your streams, there are multiple thousands outbound. So, this is mainly a list of just the top games already that are like top trending in the charts, which we'll get to. Um, but that's that. Okay. Nothing there. All right. I'm

going to go to the charts because this is an important thing. This is where the top games coming in. Um, the interesting thing here is when you hover it, you can see a little description. I always forget the naming convention on the tabs is terrible. Upcoming games sorted by trending or recent wish list counts. Only includes games not yet released on Steam. Okay. Upcoming games sorted by trending or recent wish list. So, these are games that maybe some content creator played them like a week ago. We never know what the duration is. Uh but they got a lot of wish lists in a recent period of time. What I'm going to do um is just kind of go through this list. These are top top games. um like Outbound. This game is the next Vampire Survivors. I'm going to open that. We're going to look at that one. But let's um I'm going to pick two just kind of somewhat randomly like that I've kind of saw a while ago. Let's look at this one. Tap Tap Loot, which is an idle game. And let's just see. I want to see a

couple things. I'm going to go down here and I'm going to click on Steam DB. I want to see what how many followers they got just recently to see what what it takes to get into that chart. See, this is what's so weird about trending. I don't when you look at its follower history, I don't see a huge trend. I mean, look, they're sitting on 131,000 followers. You multiply that 10, this game has 1.3 million wish lists probably. So that's why like in the last day it got see that just quick math it got almost 2,000 follower increase which means 20,000 wish lists in a day. Okay. And this goes back and then before that look at that 27 to 30 127 to 30,000. So 3,000 followers that means 30,000 wish lists. So, even though comparatively

this doesn't look like it spikes up at the end, that's very they're just almost resting rate is very high. We're talking like 20 to 30,000 wish lists per day. That's fast. That is hot. Okay, I'm going to go to this Vampire Survivors game. This game I feel like came out of nowhere cuz it's by Punkle, the uh Vampire Survivors people. I'm going to click follower. See where the how long this game's been out. I somehow missed it. It's been out since November. Like the Steam page has been out since November. But you could see see how this little bump spike right here. Let's see what their bump spike is. 9 9,000 to 930. So 3,000 wish list. See how the math isn't perfect because in recent their increase was about 300 followers translates to about 3,000 wish lists thereabouts. Not that impressive. Look, three, that's about a They increased by 100 followers, right?

Yep. They increased by about 100 followers, a thousand wish lists. That's that's good. Anybody would be happy with that. But I don't know why they're ending up on the the trending this one where it's like top thing. So, I think there's other metrics playing into this. You'll drive yourself crazy if you try and figure this all out. It's a very messy algorithm to do all this stuff. And there's some other games in here that I know did very well. Like been getting thousands of wish lists. Like if you click show more, I think the um game I know how many dudes how many dudes right here they did very well recently. I think they were getting like couple thousand a day and they're below the fold. They're in the like they're probably like 70 cuz it's 50 and then if you click show more it adds another 50. So they're probably at like 60 or 70 in the rank. I'll know because I'm doing the scrape. Um not that high. Not not

not as high as I would expect based on that. So who knows what the trending is. Let's look real quick at popular upcoming upcoming games sorted by total alltime wish list counts. So this is why I always say do the last next because you don't know if you're going to be one of these games. You just don't know. Your game could go viral, get caught picked up by content creators and and get hundreds of thousands of wish lists. And then if you wait, then you do your last Steam NextFest, you get caught and you get to do a lot of um of visibility because you're on the most wishlisted. Now, I think I think if we look at dudes, yeah, see how many dudes I think they're at like 30 33 cuz I did the scrape and I counted. um they're at about 33 in that list and they're sitting at I think they said like 120,000 in their last podcast say 120,000 wish lists. So it's very competitive. You have to have 120,000 to be number 33 on this list. It's competitive. It is competitive. So

a lot of good stuff. Um this game right under here I just calling it just tell seen some stuff that I've seen. So let's go back down to dudes. uh we got to go know these folks. They did a pivot from their last game and they are doing a uh fast follow friend slop game and we're talking slop when we say we got to go. So um again that's that's one trend that I got to say when I looked at all these and I looked at the tags the top kind of charts are friendlop. I'm seeing so much co-op multiplayer. Let's look at top demos. This is games sorted by their demo's use daily user count using recent daily activity data. I I clicked this like the first hour of the Steam NextFest and this chart wasn't even there. Like it was just empty. It was like no games to show. So I think they're just doing a rolling number of demo plays starting today. That's how it is. And so you see Berg Burglland Gnomes. I saw this game low. If this game's

rising high, I'd say this is one of those top games of Nexfest. It's a friend slop. You're playing as a gnome doing crazy stuff type of game. Whoa, that is sloppy. So, this is why we call it friend slop. Crazy. Like, it could just be as jank as I'll get out. So, what I'm trying to see is where did this come from? So, let's look at the follower count. Nothing. Max, when did when did it come out? August of 2025. December. Seven month. Total friend slop. Seven months. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I bet they released a demo here when they had 10,000 followers. Boom. When was that? That was in January. Rise right up. And they just got a high follower count. I bet this is going to go up even higher tomorrow because there's a lag between follower counts. Um I'm pretty sure when is this date? It's the 21st. So that was Yeah, like two days ago. So I have a feeling Oh, 2022. Uh February 22. I have a feeling

it's going to go even higher tomorrow. We'll see. Big spike. Um so this game is doing very well. It's one of the best um performers that I've seen so far in that list. I saw it just shoot up the list. Um what I'm looking for here is see if they did anything. Demo's out. January 30th. Didn't I say January 30th? Let's go back to the chart. January 30th. I bet what happened was they released it early. content creators were playing it and then the release demo and then boom, it shoots up. Demos are huge, folks. You got to create your demos, especially if you're friend slop. But in general, so let's go back to the list. Um, let's go back to Steam NextFest. So, in general, friend slops are really winning out. Uh, I see a lot of co-op, you know, um, multiple um, co-op type of games. Um I think or idlers. Look at this one's creature collector was also big that I saw a lot of. Got your

vampire. This is a a kind of friend slop hangout. That's what these type of games sledding game. This this game was doing very well. I did not know this tap tap loop but it has so many wishes. A million wish lists. It's kind of an idler creature collector. I think man I I looked at the tags. RPG is the most. But people put RPG on everything. Like tap tap loot as an RPG. Yeah. Um, so again, you see a lot of these, look at this bullet heaven thing game coming in. Still popular, but you just have to really have a very interesting hook. Um, you got these games where you're a dude looking over the village that he built. Citybuilder. Nothing too surprising about the types of games. Oh, good for them. Uh, how many dudes is now on top of charts for um most played demos, which is good. We got to go. Notice how we got to go was right under how many dudes, but it's separated. Um, speedrunners 2 is shown

up. This is a platformer. Platform made it, but that it's a very popular uh platformer the first time. This is another 2D game. So, we got two 2D games in there. 2D games getting in there. Um, this is a front slap game. I saw this one. I think this guy's in my community. mostly negative, but it's a friendlop flight air traffic controller game. A lot of Frog Fort. I think that's Friends Slop online co-op. So really, and what this means to me is people who like Friendlop games, like they've got a crew that they always play games with. They know NextFest means I get to just play a bunch of stuff. So, I really, and this is the latest thing since I've seen a lot of friend slap games show up, it's now just open arcade for people who like friend slop. So, you're just going to see these friendlops rocket up. Now, what that means is if you're not making a friend slop and you're not shown up on this list, that is okay. Um, I know of a game, couple games that have done very well and they were like at the bottom of this list. So, don't think, "Oh man, I'm

not friend slap. I can't do as well." Um, it's just the nature of it. Friends slap games are going to rise up naturally faster than anything else just because festival people are fun. They know they know this is going to be a shortlived thing. So they jump on it and so um friends slap games are just going to overperform. But that doesn't mean if your game's not friends slap it's never going to do well. Just depends on the type of game. But in general I'm I'm curious to see if if this changes like how how this uh games evolve. They shoot up. Uh, for the most part though, the top like 30 don't change by the end of nextfest. They kind of like wiggle around a little bit. Like one will be at the top and go down, but they all kind of bounce within this this thing. So don't if you're not on here, there's really not much by this chance. Uh, what I find is when you whatever you have coming in is what you have coming out as far as this list is involved. Um, let's do a quick I do want to kind of go through my discovery queue a little bit. part of the Oh, you know what I do want

to do? Let me scratch that. Since this is day one, when all games get that universal basic income floor of visibility, that doesn't mean everybody gets equal visibility, just means they get a shared floor of visibility. Let's look through the games that probably will not exist on Steam in like two days, like on Wednesday. Um, let's just give them a little bit of a lineup, a little a little bit of a spotlight. Uh, cuz you see some weird stuff here. you see some good weird stuff. Um, so here we are. Uh, we got box pass loves you. What you're going to see is a lot of non-traditional capsule design. Uh, which I love. It's always good. Nothing every not everything has to be professionally done. You'll see a lot of 2D platformer stuff. Boxy Pants loves you. Box Pass loves you. I don't even know what that means. Um, you just see these some games you're like, have you ever played a video game before? High score firstperson shooter

where you play through trier as a journey. You play as a tree on a journey to save the forest from an evil wizard where you can team up with friends in the full version to take down light off. I love it. Us usually these first time games you see a lot of score chase where it's like well your goal is to get the high score. You know that's what a lot of them are. This looks pretty um pretty nice. Uh pretty good. Uh it's chloro link. But then bastion bastion os. Um you also see a lot of hey we're just chill. Don't yell at us. Don't yell at us. We're chill casual. Um, hey, don't criticize me. I'm casual. Whatever criticism you have doesn't affect me because I'm casual. You see a lot of that kind of stuff. I don't know. Don't make it casual games, folks. Or don't use casual. Um, it just doesn't look You see a lot of full bolt block text in your capsule.

What is going on? I'm trying to count limbs here. We got one leg, one leg. Does he have little arms? And he's just kind of like [laughter] I know he's supposed to be a karate dude, but he just looks like he has little tiny arms or very pointy boobs. What is going on here? I don't know. That's Ranger Force. I love it. I love First Day of Steam. Mystic Tavern. You see a lot of tavern games. Just a bunch of dudes without shirts just hanging out. I don't see a tavern. They're just hanging out, sitting on benches. No shirt between them. What? What do you do? Co-op. Oh, it's a co-op simulator. See, a lot of people aren't known. You got to do friends love. [snorts] Um, just a bunch of dudes hanging out without shirts. Nothing wrong with that. You got a Jesus game. Uh, hell architect survivors survivor style. Lots of all cap tech.

Lots of all cap capsules. Um, all cap neon dodge. A lot of bullet heaven, bullet hells, very hard read to font. Is that woo wool? Nula. Nula. Okay. Nulliva. World War II psychological horror. World War II, but nothing looks. You got to have a guy with a an army helmet on. Um, Berg Hotel Heist, Beach of Boss, Classy, Classy, uh, Peasant or Rebel Gear Slots. I like these. This actually looks pretty good. Looks pretty. The CRT filter. I I'm a sucker for any game that has all black background. You know what? I'll wishlist that. Uh, crack in the dark. Classy. Classy. What lurks in the dark? Only the echoes know. Use your trusty whip to

navigate unforgiving depths. Swing across the abyss and fight the living horrors that lie within. I don't think this is a butt crack joke, is it? You would think there'd be more about the but this is why. Keep drawing crack in the dark. I think I love First Day of Steam. I think Crack in the Dark is a reference to like whip crack, but then they just have a guy with his butt cheeks hanging out. Like, is is this a game about butts? See, this is the thing about first time developers. They they don't have full control over their creative vision. If it is an ironic thing, I would see more butts. I I would expect more butts in here, but that's the only butt. So, now it makes me think, is this a crack? I you just you never know what's intentional and what's accidental with these like first- time devs. So, who knows trivia fantasy. It's the all caps text.

Love it. All caps grotto escape. I my game. I know exactly this asset pack. I use this asset pack for onescreen platformer. Nothing wrong with asset packs. I used them myself. But this hot lava, I know exactly this asset pack. I use this exact asset pack. It's a very good asset pack. Good on them. It's good. I like this asset pack. But um yeah, you just see you're going to see a lot of asset packs. Very nice. Uh misogyny. Very good. Great. You just see a lot more misogyny [laughter] in this legend of you. Good. Um pirates duel. Pirate. Pirates duel. Okay. Um, also kind of looks a little asset packy. I think I've seen this asset pack before. You just see a lot of asset packs. Um, unconventional use of pixels. Safe house. Uh, by the way, they slash it. That means it's probably not a safe house. Not safe. Retail hell. You got

full block font. Actually kind of cool. Looks a lot like um Clover Pit. Very Clover Pit vibes. Scumbag streamer. You see a lot of like very ripped from the headlines. So that's that's the first list. Um good stuff overall. Uh let's see. I just like to cry this the man who walked little uh rogue physics rogike this uh Kenny Kenny art. I don't know that the that very light pastely stuff. You got to be very careful the genre you pick with that one. What's this one? Very cool. Uh Pubble Pop looks like an idol game. That's crazy. This is the way I like how they advertise this idol game. Lot. You got to show a lot of stuff right up the exploding. Stuff's all over the place. Love it. Soul Balance. I love this art style. The very Let's

see. Souls like 2D fantasy combat game. Do they always say cuteness like they're soul soul soul like fans don't look cute? I don't know. I just I wish them the best. What is this one? Cute cozy cute and cozy exploration game. What's that one for the down below? Slide and magic. Is this game called Seth? God of Storms. Good old Seth. Kangji cats. That looks very AI uh capsule. That's the health department is not going to like that cat on the conveyor belt. Not going to like it. Tongue tongue together. Very man, that looks so janky. Looks so janky in the in that they picked that as their trailer. I don't know. I love it. I love First Day. First day. You see a lot of shooters. It

looks cute. Okay, well that's it. I see a lot of stuff. Synth laser. Oh, this must be like some sort of I saw that other one that's that neon whatever that we saw earlier. Must be some sort of like you type in some text and it outputs a vapor wave style text thing. It looks cool, but I think it's kind of overplayed. A game about opening a chest. A game about tells you it's going to be an idler. I mean, I don't think it's that bad. I think in an earlier stream somebody asked me, "What do you think about the uh construction of a game about?" It's now become a thing. A game about and then it's usually an idol game. So, I I kind of personally I don't like it. I I just I would never call my game a game about, but I can see where they're going. It just by the trends, a game about means a pretty fun idler. So, if you're willing to just like hang in and and go for that looks pretty cool. All right. Oh, boy. All right. That's it. Uh, that's day one of Steam Next. So, I just like to check in. I like to record what

the what the games we're seeing for the first thing. Uh, that's what we are, what the genres that they're pitching here are. Um, nothing too strange. If you've got a game in NextFest, here's kind of my thoughts. Um, don't freak out. Don't keep refreshing everything. It doesn't matter what your click-through rate is, what your daily wish list rate is. It's typically five times day one. So, whatever you got day one, multiply that by five and that's what you're going to get at the end of Nextfest. So, if you got 100 wish list today, you're probably going to get 500 wish list by the end of NextFest. That's just a rule of thumb that kind of always plays out. Um, so knowing that, stop refreshing. You've got games to make. So, get back to working. Uh, the other thing is don't I want you to watch this video next. I'm going to link it up here. It's a uh 1 hour of gamedev. I want you to do one hour of gamedev. No more YouTube. This has already gone on too long. I'm rambling here. I just want you to work on your game. So, click this

video. It's just sound. Just block out all these distractions from YouTube and social media. And I just want you to get an hour of gamedev done. You There's no answers here on YouTube. And then I don't want you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Do not do that. I want you to go to how tomarketaggame.comfree and join my newsletter. Again, how tomarketagame.comfree. Join the newsletter. comes in. That's how you follow my stuff. Not Not subscribing to YouTube. YouTube. Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much. Have a good rest of NextFest and I wish you the best. Bye.