Steam Next Fest 2023 Preview MONO

foreign .com telling you how to Market your game I am here at steam nextfest June edition this is happens three times a year it's always so much fun it's good to find out what's going on I'm gonna give you a tour of steam nexfest to kind of show you how you can maximize your visibility what the games are doing on there what's changing so let's take a look here so this is the front page of steam I'm in incognito mode and that's just so that you don't get recommendations we can see this is like the standard display so let's take a look all you got to do is you gotta click up here at steam nextfest the um the banner and you'll see it it's like the biggest thing in the world on the steam pages so what I am looking for is what kind of games are at the top of the lists and what kind of things are they promoting now steam usually kind of like the people at valve typically unroll new features and kind of get a sense of where valve is going

with their steam next fests so my first impressions are uh just kind of looking at this we're now in the broadcast schedule uh which means uh all the games that pick this slot right up front are getting visibility so you can pick two slots to schedule throughout the week of next Fest and that's what all these games these people went with the first slot they possibly could their strategy right now if they intended to or not is to just maximize visibility because the the visibility on Steam nextfest is the biggest day is the first day big spike everybody checks it out they're like what is going on here so these developers in this list said okay we're going to schedule our steam nextfest stream the first one right up front because we're going to maximize the visibility I don't know if this is the best strategy because look at how many games there are I mean it is it is a ton of game streaming in this first slot uh one alternative strategy which I think works very well is try to be the only game streaming so you would stream at like midnight you know us time maybe

nobody else is picking it so that whoever is on that page they only see your game I kind of favor I think the the best one is that no streamer you know you're never gonna you're never gonna out compete um all those games in that list so might as well just try and go for the least times because you're that's just you're probably gonna get better or wishlist but I don't have as much data on that as I would like so what else we're seeing here is um this is the featured stream so valve hire some professional streamers like these folks to play some of the games these games are getting tons of visibility here lots and lots of visibility on that but really people just want all the visibility they want to be on the front page this is really where you get it it's these three widgets there's three widgets here it's popular upcoming most wishlisted upcoming games in daily active demo players that's what these lists are now these people get all the wish lists I'm sure that these games will probably get 60 000 wish lists or more by the end of steam nextfest and the thing is these

games are locked in usually this this this list doesn't move very much it might shift around a little bit popular upcoming is rated based off the game's previous two weeks prior to today how many wishlists did they get how many wishlists did these games earn in the previous two weeks I usually see based on my own surveys from past next Fest it's about three thousand four thousand wish lists to get on this list so if these games got 3 000 wish lists in the previous week they're on this list the next one over is most wishlisted upcoming games this one is just total cumulative wish lists um and typically it's like I'd say the bottom that I typically see the bottom of the list right here this game's probably sitting at about 75 000 wish lists to get on this list that's probably where they are that's just my experience and then it goes up from there so the top games could you know who knows how much this this game up here uh lies of P

lies of P um and then the final one is daily active demo players that one is kind of like a self-referential one so the top two pretty much usually also get the uh the most demo plays that's just the nature of it now part of the reason it I'm doing this right at the start is you get a little kind of the weird stuff so um I have a feeling my alien roommate might go away because I didn't see it I don't think I saw it in the other two which means they just pulled some weird trick to kind of get up here maybe they just like started their stream early did a bunch of promotion to get this popping up here this is kind of luck of the draw to get it at this page at this point I have a feeling as more people play these demos this list is going to start looking a lot like these other two that's just that's just what's going to happen I have a feeling that's going to happen so let's kind of take a look at some of the games that are on the tops of the list and what I like to do about this is I like to look at the genres and the types of games to kind of get a sense of what

do people like on Steam this is a very important aspect that you should be doing when you are planning to make your next game or your first game is to kind of see like what is the general taste preferences of steam and in my experience from doing this and looking at the numbers I like to say steam is really the general steam fan is really a fan of crafty building sandboxy endlessly replayable content games that's just the steam audience the things they don't really like are puzzle games Platformers match three those kind of one and done linear content type of games steam players like deep Long playing games that's just what they like so with that assumption I like to go in and see are there any games that are violating that kind of like core understanding Are there games that are like surprising and how different they are and we'll investigate see why and see what's going on so let's take a look here let's start with the um this first one popular upcoming because

that's kind of like Trend what trend happened in the latest two weeks they kind of popped these games kind of up there now note that the games you're gonna see a lot of repeats from the most wish listed because typically to get a most wishlisted game to get 100 000 wish lists you're looking at getting lots of daily wish lists these games are hot they're blessed by the algorithm steam favors them and because of that they probably have a very high velocity already without doing any special promotion and so these lists tend to be the same because a lot of these games are just have a natural high visibility at that time these teams are also pretty sophisticated so what you also see a lot of as well they just hired a bunch of streamers to play their game in the coming two weeks they did a big ad spend so the combination of already being popular getting a high resting wish list rate from being like just blessed by the algorithm and then to their own promotion popped them up on this list but sometimes you see some cute surprises on here so let's take a look at these now like I said I'm in incognito just so that we get a like

vanilla version that we're sure the algorithm isn't serving up some games because I you know liked some weird game or something so uh this lies of p is interesting I have never heard this game I I don't know it's kind of a apparently a grim dark Pinocchio tale so some sort of robot android guy with floppish clothes let's maybe take a look at that um so what is this genre looking at um it looks kind of like solzy third person you know battling type of game the swords game you know just Souls Souls like we'll just call them Souls like even though I might not have the same metastructure I just mean like third person beat em up style swinging swords hitting stuff okay let's look at the next one down warhaven also third person kind of throwing stuff around type of game that's interesting when I see two games already there this is looking good A lot of people like the third person swingy stuff now wizard

with a gun um the other thing to be interested is how is valve displaying games they usually kind of roll out new features and look at this they're showing when you hover they're showing the micro trailer here um valve recently implemented this feature where the first two trailers they they got kind of spammy with the trailers like some games would have like 12 trailers and it'd be trailer trailers trailer trailer a lot of people on Reddit well I complained about this like three years ago and said wow if you got too many trailers and nobody watches trailers because I did that steam study okay I'm just one weird guy on the internet I was saying this three years ago and then all of a sudden Reddit about six months ago posted this long thread that kind of went viral where everybody's complaining about all the trailers on Steam and nobody uses trailers they'll use screenshots I told valve that three years ago um and so after after all that Reddit thread all of a sudden they cleaned up the trailers thing which means they now have two trailers on your steam page and valve recommends first trailer gameplay second trailer screenshot or like uh

your cinematics your expensive one look at this game right here look at this uh hover thing this is pulling the the the reason valve said put your first trailer's gameplay is because your first trailer uh turns into uh the this they Source this to take the micro trailer that when you hover okay so you should always put gameplay in your first one like a devolver doing their own thing oh then devolver loves I I didn't even know this was a devolver game and then I hovered over and I saw this like animated slow trailer and I was like that must be a devolver game devolver always does this they always have these cinematic trailers that don't show gameplay and they put in their first one come on devolver get your act together it should be your second trailer is this one I don't know what kind of gameplay is this what is this gameplay oh I see a little bit down there top down third person so that's what kind of the game that is so again kind of what do they call it um online co-op sandbox I told you sandboxy Co-op is huge too I didn't mention that people love to play games

with their friends uh then we have the Invincible which I have seen this this thumbnail forever I thought this game had already released and was being out there but they got they got a build for uh steam nextfest um and it is your first person open world survival crafty building game so very popular genre it looks great super high high Productions on guard another third person sortie slashy game steam Shoppers like them now you might be a first time developer say okay Chris has already seen three slashy beat em up type third person games I should make one be warned this is a very hard genre because your controls have to be super tight there can be no slop no slack you have to have an expert gameplay developer who's really good at this stuff in designer real time like beat them up this is hard stuff to do but if you can do it there's a big audience but it has to your quality has to be bar none okay so let's keep going Station to

Station sandboxy kind of strategy building game this this is classic steam I love this kind of like laying out tracks trains this is a steam game if I've ever seen one crafty building simulationy this is what I mean beautiful game tube great graphics notice all the games have been 3D 3D games are very popular very hot right now jump light Odyssey uh you are kind of reminds me I'm getting I'm feeling Vibes I'm getting Vibes out of the kids say I'm getting I'm feeling I don't remember what the kids say uh but I'm getting oh it's giving that's what they say it's given me um it's giving me Vibes of like um two-point hospital kind of this top-down building strategy you know kind of resource management game but you're kind of building this uh jump light facility uh let's look at this next one viewfinder this one you know I say uh puzzle games don't always do very well on Steam because one of the reasons why is streamers they hate playing puzzle

games because they get stuck and then they're just like sorry kids watching me I don't know how to solve this puzzle I look like an idiot uh just watch me bash my head against the wall here while I try and solve this puzzle that's bad streaming nobody wants to watch that and that's why streamers don't typically like puzzle games but this game has gone viral several times because it has such an interesting mechanic which is whatever you take a picture of you can drop in the real world and you solve puzzles by kind of capturing screenshots this is really cool I don't know how they do it it's an amazing Tech that they've got um and I think that's really what's going on here it has gone viral on social media he was talking about it there very hard to do with a puzzle game it has to be exceptional which this game is that's propelled it up that's why it's one of the most wishlisted most trending games also has a big publisher that's really good so they probably put a lot of effort behind that okay turnites as you could see a lot they're not following the um the rule where it should be gameplay in your first trailer look at all the Cinematic stuff I'm not knowing what kind of game there it is right

there top third person sword battly Punchy game what other factors a uh uh Action Game dating action game neat hook it's uh boyfriend dungeons here's another thing is boyfriend dungeons was an interesting hook they said hey that's only one game if it's an interesting hook you could do it again so I think this is cool they're testing out like hey more dating dungeon games why not the world needs more dating dungeon games and they've got it right here so don't be afraid if somebody steals your idea you're like oh there's no idea you can still link it I don't know where they got the idea maybe they did like boyfriend dungeon they're like the world needs more boyfriend dungeons that's kind of what that is house flipper Classic Building game this is uh this is the most simulationy building game and it's playway so we know it the other interesting thing I saw about playway look at this house flipper franchise sale this is playway getting a daily deal which is super strong once you get a good game on Steam it's a lot easier everything else rolls

I bet I don't know when this uh publisher franchise sale went which is typically a daily deal uh this can Propel a game up uh I bet they did they were high-fiving at the playway corporation here when they got this because this visibility influences this which influences next Fest it comes together as a nice Synergy if you can kind of Stack these things very helpful very good in there very smart marketing team by doing this most revisibility comes from Steam and that's what they're doing playway doing the their playway thing this is the perfect steam game simulation ability thing and you were literally building in this one so let's go back to the front page I'm just gonna go through the top 10 here uh Shadow Gambit the cursed crew um I saw this I think it's like an x-com top-down ability strategy or not building just strategy type of game I think it's kind of x-com like I'm just seeing from the perspective and some of the things it's called a strategic

combat games so let's keep going down Final on Grand Enterprise travel Survivor Grand Empires time travel survival it's kind of open world Survival Craft Classic genre on Steam again notice all of them 3D games steam just likes 3D games they really do not say that 2D games can't do it but to get yourself that kind of momentum that it takes to get into this popular stuff 3D really where is where it's at it just it just takes over now I've done enough of these surveys and I kind of know what's going to happen the games that are on this front page either one of these tabs any of these tabs because there's a lot of overlap we're looking at at least probably like 40 000 wish lists this week these games are gonna get these games are gonna get that um and uh the games underneath so you can go more let's just show you you can click more show more there's a whole nother tier of games here and then you can also do those games

that are one tier below I usually see maybe 10 000 wish lists in the first uh during this week they're probably gonna get ten thousand seven thousand somewhere around there then you can go to these pages and here's the interesting thing each one of these are kind of genre tags up here at the top each one of these has a separate list of games these games are all randomized by certain things the most important thing is down here once you scroll down down here way down steam really packing on the stuff up there another list subdivided by just the genre it mirrors the the genre up above in other words the the main page where there's a most wishlisted trending and then most played demos but it's filtered just to the genre these games if they did not so you get a second stab at it a lot of these games will very popular but not enough to be on the front page these games again will get about 7 000 to about three thousand wishlists on these sub category pages in my experience and then everything else is going to get probably

like in the 2000 on down depending on how good their capsule is how interesting their game is in the genre that's kind of my breakdown of how things work now if you're watching this and you're like my game's in next Fest what's going on what am I gonna get take your day one total of wish list which you will get tomorrow morning at about 9 00 a.m Pacific time that's kind of when steam rolls over and shows your 24 hour wish list period from the week prior or from the day prior I should say you take that you multiply it by five that is going to be about where your steam nextfest totals are going to be I've done the averages it comes out to about 5x so your day one total times five equals the total wish list you will get this week okay so you can tell your boss hey there's what I think we're gonna have and they think you're cool um the thing is it gets a little bit I broke it down even though that five times a o is basically an average of all games I did a little deeper diving if you are not on any of these front page Widgets or the genre ones you're looking

at about four times so if you didn't get featured in the top 10 on the genre Pages or the top 10 on the front page multiply it by 4.0 if you are on the front page that is probably going to be about 5 five or six somewhere there front page just so many wish list it's incredible a couple other interesting things I noticed okay when we go to the top they used to in previous steam next Fest right up here they used to do a genre Sizzle reel where they would do you know like top platformer games like if you went over to platformer and you clicked um platformer you would get let's see if it refreshes why is it not loading maybe I'm already on platformer anyway um on the platformer thing you would get just platformer Sizzle Rail and it would just be like a montage of that they stopped doing that I think they realized nobody really watches them it doesn't influence the wishlist either uh people are always like oh I wish I could get into that Sizzle reel it didn't really do much um they usually pick the

prettiest games for the sizzle reel and those games were already on there I saw a couple because I've done so much data I've seen games got featured in it and it didn't make any difference you know if they were like the first time there basically if you want visibility it's really simple the equation is very simple it's are you on the front page of scene are you in this primary widget here that that's that's it that's the big thing are you in the primary widget that's it this is the real thing that's going to determine your visibility it's how many wishlists you have coming into steam nextfest and what's your velocity going in there like did you get a bunch of wishlists ahead of time running in did you get streamer coverage did you get press coverage did you pay for ads that's what influences this uh this wishlist velocity to get you into the into the popular games and with that um that's how you do it that's how you do steam access and so a lot of people wonder when should I do next test they launched their steam page they launched their demo and then immediately go into steam access I do not recommend that

because the whole way to maximize steam access which you can do only one time and you get to pick when you want to do it with that strategy I always say do your last one before you launch your game because you're going to be going in with the most velocity you're gonna have the most wish list you're going to be have the biggest audience and so you can use that to propel your demo up I also don't recommend you launch your demo with steam nextfest your demo should be highly Polished by the time it gets to steam nextfest because it would really suck if you got into steam nextfest and uh when you got into steam nextfest there was like a big game crashing bug if somebody had like an AMD processor or some stupid you know bugs the way they show up you want your demo well tested in bullet Pro you know Bulletproof that is steam access is not the time to figure that out you should be doing your demo ahead of time I'm speaking to the people who are planning their next next fast get that demo up nice and early like you know soon and then then launch

your uh then do steam Nexus just before you launch your game for full and I mean Early Access and full game because once you launch your game once somebody can buy your game you cannot participate in Steam Nexus so be strategic be smart be strategic about these things I'm just going to kind of look through a couple other things see if I see anything else that is there uh for the king uh looks like RPG Style game RPGs are big but they also take a ton of resources strategic uh RPGs those are really popular but here you pay for it and all the content that you're gonna make CS stars is the first kind of pixel art game um it's RPG as well though uh so again deep deep gameplay usually counteracts uh you know having 2D we got our house flipper again wizard uh wizard with a gun devolver not showing gameplay again Invincible we saw that one one lonely Outpost there we go it looks like a um a farming sci-fi Colony Sim classic

genre for steam um gourd let's see this one looks like ghosts come on give me gameplay give me gameplay your first trailer on your steam page should be gameplay because I'm I'm just seeing so this game is me just watching ghosts walk around that's not a game I think it's actually let's let's check it out I think you see this is why you gotta put your first trailer's gameplay I don't know what type of game it is um let's see here oh I love this by the way something else this is just great I love this deckled Edge on the gifts that's so cool um I think it's a top-down RPG looking game oh look look at that you're building something building crafty I sound like a broken record but really steam loves building crafty stuff and then whatever meta you want to throw on it uh RPG you want to throw uh a colony Sim on top of that you want to throw like um uh like uh you know some sort of Rogue

aspect to it but steam just loves to build a crafty that's just that's just what they do okay so warhaven up slashy game we looked at that before steamworld build a way to get it the keyword in there build because steam loves building crafty they say this is this is like optimized for steam keywords steam build right there Steam Works build classic franchise classic Model thrown together build uh city builders plus a very popular franchise brilliant stuff here viewfinder is the puzzle game we talked about Moonstone Island this is the first kind of wholesome game I'm seeing um and it looks like kind of a uh it's giving uh basic uh you know kind of like um why am I what am I having it on here it's giving me Island Vibes it's given me um Animal Crossing with mixed with stardew Valley Vibes that's what it's giving uh so that's that's essentially

it so really so far genres I'm not seeing many surprises I think the interesting thing I'm seeing so far is a rise in kind of those the slashy games I'm really surprised by how much slashy game there is and then I'm also uh no surprise by the number of building crafty games I am not surprised that I see Zero Platformers people just don't like Platformers I don't see any in the top genre charts um and uh the other surprise that I see is no trailers no Sizzle rail trailers and everything else looks pretty good there's one puzzle game no surprise there and this game is like the best puzzle game I've seen come out in the last six months in other words like uh in other words virality people showing this game every year there's one or two puzzle games that really captures the imagination um like Baba's you type of game that sort of thing one or two per year and that's what I'm saying is folks puzzle games

are very hard to stand out but you can there's so many building crafty games so that's kind of what I'm getting from this steam next Fest let's look at demos real quick demo daily active demos is kind of wonky because people can turn on their demo right at the last minute so you kind of get some weird stuff featured in here like primitive Society simulator that was not on any of the charts but it's there I think a lot of times it's just like they got their demo up first and whoever randomization of the algorithm click this one into the existence first but again build the colony simulator type of game top down uh it's doing well I expect these type of games to drop out because the big boys and girls those top two genre charts are gonna those ranking charts are gonna just dominate this so that's why I want to get in nice and early so I could catch some of these weird things that have happened Greenland multiplayer oh that's ooh it's kind of like a uh vampire Stars I like to see vampire survivors the other thing is I didn't see any vampire survivors I

think I saw one vampire Survivor like in that list um they are leveling up how beautiful they are uh I'm seeing more 3D ones so that's interesting to watch to see where the vampire Survivor likes are coming in look at this game look at all those guns uh I think vampire Hunters let's see Don vampires you need to be in lots of modem vampires demons I think this might be an FPS I gotta look deeper I just saw this game this might be a FPS vampire survivors like and instead of having swirling things around you you get a room a Viewpoint full of guns and mobs are coming at you interesting thing we'll play this one later um broken roads similar thing let's see what is this one broken roads is a narrative driven RPG RPGs do well it's just they're very hard to create because you have to put so much content into them a Chinese only game wow that's interesting and Heretics Fork uh this is cool this is like a deck builder Tower Defense looking kind of vampire survivors like I'm talking to the developer he did some good stuff with

that I'll I'll update you what else anything else housewarber VR a VR game VR games almost never do up here because there aren't many people that are doing VR in other words not many people have VR equipment and they'd rather just kind of play this stuff so I kind of think this is one that popped in at the last minute some weird fluke of the algorithm I don't expect this one to stick around we'll see I'll do one at the towards the middle part then we'll really find out I'm just trying to capture the moment at this front right here and then doomed miles what we got oh this is like a crafty building it looks like a forager like with too many cut scenes come on put your gameplay the only thing that tells me that is that little pop in existence this is a forager like which is kind of like a it's this neat genre where you um if you haven't seen it it's kind of like a very simplified Colony stand where you can drop stuff in and then your Island expands as you build and then you craft things yeah this is really giving me those vibes this is really I think I've seen this game before but yeah very forager-like and then there's some randomization there so really good stuff I'm I'm liking what I'm seeing um

nothing too too surprising to see but folks really put your gameplay so here's what I mean to see Steam only lets you have two trailers right here put your gameplay one no trailers right in that first slot and then you can do the one where you spend all the money hiring an animator to animate trailer which I don't recommend but if you're a devolver you got nothing but money so where are you gonna spend your money anyway higher animator is great but put those kind of animated trailers in the second slot first one should be exclusive gameplay that way you can get those cool um hover things and they look good so people can determine genre so put lots of UI gameplay that kind of stuff right up front so you can see that um but that's kind of what I'm seeing with this steam next Fest I'll probably do another one of these before the end of the week I might even be playing some games to look at some stuff a couple of other things that I didn't see anything new as far as ways of wish listing and stuff because now one of the big ones about I'd say two next best ago probably about nine months ago they added this wishlist widget where you just wish list

it without even looking at the page which is interesting that's why you can't calculate click-through rate because there's so many factors about how people can wish list View and interact with your capsule and Pages the numbers are wonky just look at which illustrate that'll tell you whether people like it any other things any other advice I would have for somebody in nextfest right now um one thing oh this is news I saw this from my community a couple people last minute decided to drop out of next Fest they they sent the right forms and submitted it seems that Police pull us were not ready for next Fest yet and valve didn't listen or something happened and their games appear in here so if you see any games and there's no demo that means they probably tried to opt out of steam nextfest but for whatever valve didn't do it and so we're waiting to hear what happens but if you at the last minute opted out of Nexus here's a PSA for you be sure to open a support if you see it in next Fest and all this stuff and you don't have a demo live because you're like Oh I thought we were out of Nexus we opted out at the last minute valve may put you in there and I recommend you contact valve and

say hey we accidentally showed it here we want to we don't want to do this next Fest please know that we're not trying to game the system here we want to be in the right next vest which is whenever you do want to be so it's a little bit of emergency I get a little nervous about that so make sure you contact valve about that um the other thing is if you are a developer just keep watching keep watching for these to see how many other games you're going to show up in in other words like how many other games are going to be uh in this list it's an important thing because you my bad is you want to kind of opt out um uh you want to basically opt into one where there's not a lot of people so that you're like right at the top because who knows I think it's random which one shows up at the top because nobody's gonna scroll down unfortunately oh I want to watch this one this is the one I want to watch who knows uh but that's kind of how it goes um let's see if there's anything outside I can think of for this I might play a couple because I like to see how people do the CTA within their menus and stuff to say play this demo um I also like to play the games to see

where they cut off their content what they show in their game how long the demo is if they do any other cool messaging tricks like join the mailing list that kind of stuff I love to see that stuff um so we'll just keep in touch um if you've found a game that's cool comment below if you want to hear anything in the next uh live stream from Steam nextfest comment below I will also keep that into account and again I might be covering it later this uh this week um and if you have anything else just you know where to find me how to Market a game.com that's where I am and I write our newsletter every week which you can join at howtomarketagame.com free I've got courses talks benchmarks to find out how many wishlists you expect to get out of this next Fest probably about 60 000 down to a thousand that's probably typically where most people land usually closer to a thousand that's just the way it goes I'm sorry kids um that's it have a good one stay cool stay positive

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