Nothing has changed: June Steam Next Fest 2026

Hey, it's Chris Zukowski here for Steam Next Fest June edition. I'm going to be going through what's going on with Steam Fest, what's new, what's different, what you can expect. So, I got a blog post. Read the blog, it's much better than this YouTube stuff. Go just look below, I've got the link to the blog. But anyway, I'm going to go through what's new in Steam Next Fest. It's actually nothing's new. I'm just I'm not clickbaiting, I'm just telling you right now there's nothing new. The Steam algorithm doesn't change as much as everybody changes all the time. So anyway, let's go through it. I'm just going to go through it. I like to keep track of what's new and what's not, and then I've got it also I'm I'm just reveal it now so there's so doesn't it accuse me of like taking too long. This video takes too long. Uh it's right here. It's this tool I made. Uh so you can track how many wish lists you've gotten if it's normal because people always want to know if they're normal. Just like uh in the showers in high school, you always want to know if you're normal or not.

Here's Here's how you you measure how normal you are. Um I'll get to that. I'll explain this. It's Here's the site howtomarketagame.com/snf Steam Next Fest. Uh you just you just put that in there. You can share the stuff on Reddit, post your picture say, "Hey, this how many got." I just I built this thing because a lot of people were like hand drawing in MS Paint how my statistics from past Next Fest and how their game lined up. I just built the tool well Claude built it for me. Um how to do this stuff so you don't have to like do MS Paint stuff. Looks unprofessional. Don't upload that to YouTube or Reddit. Use real tool, which is this one. So anyway, let's go through Next Fest. I do this every single Next Fest just so that I can keep track of what's new so that people go like, "Was that new this year? Did they add something?" I'm going to go through it. And what I did was I track every year. Let me see if I can do this real fast. Um I'm going to just go like this. 3 1 I have the power to make stuff turn black when I'm

when I go like that. Um I'm going to add this one thing. So, I take a picture every year of what the front page of Steam looks like. So, this is uh let me just do this one right ready 3 2 1 There it is. Hey, hey, it worked. All right. Um every year I take a picture of what Steam Next Fest looks like. This is from February well every every time it happens. So, this is February and then I compare it line them up uh compare them to the new Next Fest. Oh, that's the chart tool. Here it is. This is the new one. And I just compare them so that it'd be like people like, "Oh, it's changed all the time." You know what's different? It Here's the whole difference. I compared them. Here's the difference. This thing right here. It's cuz uh it just says exploration mode. You think you can click this thing. It looks like it looks like you should click it. It's not. It's just a trick. I think it's just even an image. No. No, it's it's actually HTML. Let's see if let me let me let me do the finder here. Oops. Let me let me let me push the wrong button. I get F12 is the inspector. Let's let's

inspect real quick. Is it actually a button? Yeah, it is a button. It is actually a button. They just disabled it. Um And what it does it This is to alleviate the fears cuz every time every like you look down these games like no offense if this is one of your games. But you look at some of these games you're like is there like has somebody ever some of these people actually played a video game before? You see some of these games I'm I'm not pointing to any of these right here. But you look at some of these you're like, "This is not a real game." Because in the first 2 days of Steam, the the algorithm shows all of these to everybody. Um it just it randomly picks games and shows them to people and people freak out because when somebody isn't good at making games, they look very weird and people like, "Oh, it's so spammy." So, um it's all AI. It's It's AI art. So, people freak out. And so, what Steam did was they just put this little widget here. Right here. They were like, "Hey, it's just random right now. This is not what Steam normally looks like." And let me tell you folks, most of the time people

do not spelunk in the depths of real gutter of what Steam is. Like, they only see the stuff that's made it to the front page, and that stuff is then filtered. So, you're seeing the first 2 days of Steam Next Fest, the unfiltered stuff. That's why they they say right here they have this widget just to People don't freak out when they see the real game does. And when I say 75% of all games on Steam will never get visibility, you're seeing that stuff, and it freaks people out. It's just a little too much for people. I I spelunk, so I see. All right, so here's literally guys, there's nothing else different on this page. Like, all this is the same. These categories, literally section by section, the text of this is the same. Even when you go to the bottom, this text is exactly the same. Let me Let me change this cuz uh the the alignment's a little weird. Let me just There's This text is literally the same. Like, even in my last video, again I linked to the the February video that I did with this. This is exactly the same.

They forgot a period at the end of onward. They still didn't add the period. It's been 3 months. They still didn't add a period to the end of onward. I It's just It's hanging out there. It's like, "Something got to cut off. Better recommend games to players from Wednesday onward to Monday." They could have just said on to Monday. They didn't fix that. Still still says that stuff. So, really guys, not Steam doesn't change as fast as everything is always a freaked out about. The only thing they did was add this button. So, let's just kind of go through. This is their typical video. I thought just seeing this thumbnail they were going to do like a parody on backrooms, which would be a funny joke. And then instead it's just kind of like, "Oh, Crazy Casey." I mean, she's funny. She's cute. She's funny. She brings lightness to to the Valve team, but this would have been a really neat uh backrooms spot cuz they're kind of like they've really driven backrooms stuff. It's because of them that I don't know, maybe the movie did well. Uh but anyway, that's neither here nor there.

Um okay, uh this stuff is all just random, but I I feel like this is random plus a little bit of better stuff cuz a lot of the stuff isn't as bad as you normally see. I'm doing this now because I like to capture it before it starts changing. All this stuff again, um I just rewatch the same video. I'm not going to rehash this stuff. A couple of other things that freaks people out, it's 4,358 and I went back I should have done this ahead of time. I think I did. Let me Let me pull it up. I I I kept track of the previous years when I looked at that number. Um let me let me pull it up. So before we had in June we had 4,351. No, that can't be right. No, that's that's not that's that's right now. So it does change like um when I checked it this morning I checked it this afternoon, 4 is 400 4,351. Seven more games added since I got there. Don't freak out. February was 3,458.

So about 900 games have increased this next fest versus the February one. In October 2025, it was 2,650. So there are a lot more games coming in. There there are, but again, folks, um don't tell anybody I said that, but they're they're really like some of these games I look at them I'm like, again, you're going to play a video game. Oh, the other thing people always like, Chris writes about stuff and then they everybody makes that genre. Look, number one is puzzle games. If people really were doing stuff based on what I was writing, this number would be zero or one. John Blow's puzzle game, that's it. Um and then like some of these other ones would be like Pierre's platformer is still there. If if people are listening to me, platformer again would be one or two. It wouldn't be that much. I mean, the stuff like where's idle? Does idle even show up in

here? I don't think it does. Uh you know, some of these things if if you read I People don't actually listen to what I say. They really don't. Anyway, so um so I guess the big news the takeaway here is it doesn't matter. Like that stuff hasn't changed, okay? I'm excited about this. I might play the original demo. We're going to play it again. I'm not just going to go through this stuff. The other thing um the charts, this is the big thing. This is why you have to wait and I always say do the last next fest before you launch because you have a chance to show up on these charts, the popular upcoming top demos. A lot of games go beyond the baseline of what they show you on the randomization through these charts. So, if you get on these charts, you're you're probably going to be in the diamond tier or gold tier of my charts that I'm going to show in a second, okay? Um that's that's the stuff that's that's that's happening there. Um I think let's check this out. There's something else

that I want to check. If you go by genre, you can see the genres they recommend. And I'm I was curious last time if if they were changing based on the things and I think I have that. Yeah, pull this up. Um I'm going to look see what what genres Uh no, I don't Okay, here's the genres from February. It was action, adventure. I'm just going to read them off and you read the video. So, I'm reading off of February. Action, adventure, strategy, simulation, RPG, puzzle, sports, racing, platformer, visual novel, idler, rhythm and music. The genres they list here exactly the same as the previous six months. So, but it's not going to be the same. I'm not going to write any I I write about Steam Next Fest so many times. I I just have only one to say, "Doesn't seem like much has changed this Next Fest over the previous one." Yes, there's more games. I have a feeling most of them are AI art, whatever,

hobbyist games that aren't going to get any visibility, so it doesn't really change anything. Here's my basic thing. Now, let's Let me switch over. I'm going to go like this, and we're going to switch over to the new chart tool that I built. God built. This is the calculator. So, here's the deal. Is Steam doesn't It's kind of locked in. Your game is your game. And I'm going to give you a quick preview of what what's going on here and how to use this little tool. Okay. I added If you hover over the the question mark, I tell you how to get this data. Um this is the store impressions. So, what you do is you go in You got to dig down. Don't just do number of impressions. Dig down to the store impressions. And so, I even put the help here, so you make sure, cuz if if you say you you could get a lot of impressions, but they're not coming from Steam Next Fest. They're coming from like maybe you have ads running or something like that. So, you got to make sure it's just those. And as you type on me, and it's going to add them to this daily impressions chart, because as you go through the week, you're going to add

these in, and they're going to they're going to change. Now, this stuff, look, there's a Steam Next Fest little thing. This is where you can upload it to Reddit and tell people like, "Oh, no, I'm not getting any impressions. What should I do now?" I'll answer that in a second. But you can just click that, and you can download an image just to this chart, or you could do this just the wish list chart, and the other things there. The next thing, this is also cool that I did. Um so, I had about What's my Did I say the data point? You can add these up. I think it's like 200. Maybe like I mean I think it's like 157. Somewhere around there. I got data from February from about let's call it 150. 150 games. And so I have a pretty good data set so that you can kind of estimate your wish list total. So depending on how many wish lists you get day one and it's it's already 4:00 p.m. You can type it in. And my chart, if you got 2,450 wish lists day one on Steam Next Fest, that's very good. And my chart my data

here auto updates based on what I saw for games that got 2,450, this is the range. The low end was 1,500, the high end was 3,000 30,000 and the median was 20,000. So it automatically updates so you can do it. So if you got 245 wish lists today, it's just for today, um this is what you're looking at. This is your your goals. Stuff doesn't change. Your your game and your destiny happens. Not many surprises happen. Need to be boring. There aren't that many surprises. Um and what this does is this browser saves your state and so when you come back tomorrow, as long as you're on the same browser, you're still using Chrome or whatever browser, it should save a little cookie thing so that when you come back, it's still there. Now I don't see this data. This is all just in browser. You can just do a just in browser. Just look at the inspector code. I don't I don't see this data. I think at the end I'm going to add a little button here that says send to Chris and then it'll then it'll send

it to me, but you have to opt in and you say I'm sending. I don't see any of this data. But you come back every day and you enter in your data and it'll save it so that you don't have to keep track of it all. And then you'll see how it's progressing, but I think as you like if you kept getting 245, I think the model will keep saying the same thing. I mean it'll it it gets more deterministic as the probability goes down about what they are, but see it doesn't change. So if you're getting 245 a day with 100% I don't know why Yeah, see? With 100% it works. All this stuff is just like I don't know I don't know how it does it. It's just magic. Uh but anyway, as you dial in the numbers, it'll it'll give you the estimate. So, you get 7,900. But that's how it works. So, throughout the week, just come back and just update this stuff and it'll do a probabilistic determination of how many wishes you're going to get by the end of the festival. This is just based on statistics from real data from other games who did it the previous Next Fest. And as as I said, um

it's not very different. This Steam Next Fest isn't very different from the last one, even down to the missing punctuation. Um so, that's that. I'm sorry if it doesn't look that great, but we'll tell you for you. Other There's plenty of other festivals in the sea. Um I'm just trying to give people a sense of where they are because I think it leads to conspiracy theories when people feel unease. And I'm trying to just reduce the unease. This stuff There's not many surprises. Really, it stuff doesn't We we know pretty much by day one of Next Fest what the rest is going to be. People ask, "What can I do? How can I improve it? How can I improve my odds?" It's too late. Your Your cake is baked. Okay, I'm just going to answer this question cuz people always ask, "What do I do at Steam Next Fest? Should I just do ads?" No. Here's the thing. You don't want to do ads because all the publishers with big games that are This is diamond tier. Uh I forgot. You can So, if you're Remind me. If If you're down here, let's

say your daily impressions are only like 3,000. So, you're down at the bottom. Yeah, you're kind of It's kind of hard to see you. So, you can turn off the other ones and then it'll just orient the chart so you can see better. Anyway, um the people who are getting published with publishers and are They're getting lots of wishlists. Publishers will spend a lot on ads. So, you are actually spending money on ads compete with big publishers. Don't spend money on ads. You're like, "Oh my god, we only got 1,000 wish lists. We only got 1,000 wish lists today. Oh my god, Chris, this is terrible. I'm going to spend money on ads." Don't do it. Don't do it. Save that money. Save that money for your next game. If the cake is baked, that money that you are going to spend on ads, it's going to go down the toilet because it's a bidding system and Reddit ads are getting bid out by big publishers with lots of money. And so you're you're you're literally It's an auction system. So you're bidding against like a Devolver or like a I don't know. Somebody who's got a lot of money. And and that's not a wise use of your resources. Um you can contact streamers.

You could con- contact contact creators, but they have probably already picked their top games and they're going to just play them for the rest of the week. It's too late. They might do you do your game after after Steam Next Fest, but that's not going to help. It's too late. The cake's baked. Your game is your game. People will either like it or they don't. There's nothing you can really change here. So don't freak out. Just enjoy your week. Um if it's not doing well, my recommendation is go to Steam and play a bunch of demos. Go over to here to Steam Next Fest. Click by the genres. You can do like I don't know. Make it an idler. See what the top idlers are. I think if your first game failed, make an idler. You learn so much about Steam and why Steam likes stuff and doesn't. Um and if you scroll down here, you can see what the top ones are. I believe you can do that. I think you can sort by I mean, it'll it'll be next couple days you could actually filter. I think you can filter based on that. But my thing is we'll go to this one. We'll go to the we'll go to the genre or the charts.

Play these top games. Maybe not the top top top. Like some of these down here that look a little low like not bad, but just like if you go down here, you start to see games that you could actually make. Like those are big studios. And you keep going down and just play some of these demos because you start to learn what Steam likes. And if you're making one If you didn't listen to me and you're making a casual puzzle platformer Why don't they like my game? Content creators don't play my stuff. They must be going to spam. genre. So, look at these games, play these games. Like a horror fishing game, that's Steam loves that stuff. And so, you get a sense of what Steam likes. So, the best use of your time if you just type this in and my analysis, my Steam numbers have told you that you're going to get like a thousand wishes. Just relax. Just play demos, learn new stuff. Um updating a demo like you're like, "Oh, we're going to

add new levels every single day of Next Fest." I've done analysis, it doesn't help. The cake's baked. Um just enjoy like okay. If there's a major critical bug and people can't play or the servers are crashing, yes, definitely update. You can update your game throughout Next Fest, it doesn't hurt your stats in any way, but it doesn't help. But if somebody's like the game's literally broken, yeah, fix that. Definitely fix that, but other than that, there's no gimmicks you can pull. Just relax. Enjoy Next Fest, play other demos, learn how Steam works. That's my advice. Um I hope this reassures you. I'm going to call it quits. I'm I'm like jet lagged here. I'm I just flew in from an uh overseas. I went from Europe to here and so, I'm jet lagged in pretty hard right now. But um so, that's what it is. But this is the tool. Uh oh, and then if you click down here, you can read the analysis where this comes from. I also think I I deleted I didn't said this. I should probably add a link to this. To try it out. Um give me

feedback. It's going to be updated throughout the week as people probably find bugs with this script thing. Click this, you get the stats that I pulled from. Last from February. So, this all comes from February. The data and stuff. And so, I just took all that data and I kind of worked it into this tool so I can do the prediction model. Uh but basically, for the most part, most games it's based on how many wish lists you have going into Steam Next Fest. It's really a determining factor. Read this blog post. It explains all the thing. Um unless it's a super viral genre like idle games or something. Sometimes those pop off and you can have a low like um friend slot. If you're one of those super hot viral genres right now, you can go in with low wish lists in the Steam Next Fest and have them outperform the expected median. But for most games, the wish lists you have going in equivalent to the correlates to how many you're going to get out of it. I don't make the rules. I wish that

wasn't the case. I wish it was some other thing, but that's just way it goes. So, anyway, um hope you enjoy the tool. Uh post it on Reddit. Sounds good. Please say hey, I got this from Chris Zukowski, how to market a game.com. So, other people can do it. {slash} steamnextfest. So, that's what it is. howtomarketagame.com {slash} steamnextfest. I hope to see your charts. Post them. Um follow me for more stuff. Not here on YouTube. Don't subscribe to this YouTube. howtomarketagame.com {slash} free. And you get my free book. Join the newsletter. You get You get real stuff. You have to edit out the kind of stuff that you say on YouTube because people get bored and they have the low attention span on YouTube. So, I can't put actual data in YouTube because people will get bored and then my numbers drop. So, I have to put the real stuff. So, reading is cool, kids. Read. Don't watch. What I want you to do after this is don't keep refreshing Steam. I mean, fill out the chart. See where your chart's done for Steam Next Fest. Then once you do it for today, hold off. 4:00 p.m. Pacific time is when

the data really updates when you finish that number. Don't keep refreshing Steam all day waiting for your numbers to tick up. Don't watch YouTube. Those are wastes of your time. Instead, start working on your next game if your numbers are really bad and you're like, "What do I do?" Or finish your game. I'm going to link to a video that's just white noise because the YouTube algorithm tries to hijack your brain so that you're watching YouTube and not working on your game. Don't do that. Either read my blog or watch this video that will allow you to time to actually focus on making a game. Don't play YouTube in the background. Play this video that's just white noise. Technically, it's brown noise in the background so that you can work cuz you got to work to get this done. Watching YouTube doesn't count as work. Anyway, with that said, goodbye. Thanks for watching. Hope you find something to choose here. Bye.