What demos are winning Steam Next Fest?

Hello, hello, hello. It's Steam NextFest time. This is part two of my coverage of Steam NextFest. What I'm going to be doing here is looking at some NextFest games, how the charts are, and uh for engagement, you should wait about 10 minutes because you're gonna learn something surprising. I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm just going to tease it for 10. No, I don't do that. YouTube sucks. YouTube encourages stuff. I'm just going to give you all the details I know right away. Okay, so what we're going to do is um we're just going to look at NextFest and some observations that I have and I'm also doing this just for posterity reasons because I'm always like, wait, did they do that last year? Is this the first year? So, I'm just going to look at all the features they've added. We're going to go along together. Now, if you're making a game or you're thinking of making a game, this is a very important thing. You've got to shop for Steam games like a Steam shopper, okay? And you'll find what is actually selling cuz

I think this is the big thing is a lot of devs don't actually look at the store, play these games. We're going to play some demos. We're going to play some games. Well, I'm not going to play demos right now. I'm just going to find games that I should play as demo and I'm going to play them tonight or something. This is a very important thing. You need to play games. You need to play the games that are selling well. And we're going to go through this. Okay? So, stick around for the 10-minute mark where we're going to learn some No. Don't worry about that. I'm gonna give you all the good stuff all around. Okay, this front page of Steam. This is a my account, so this is real stuff. You're going to see stuff that I've probably wishlisted. Uh we're going to just look at what the the thing is. The first thing I always check is if there's any new tabs or anything. And there's not really. It's pretty standard from what we saw before. Um home will look at it for you is more personalized than genre, theme, feature, charts. I think these um genre is pretty important because you could subdivide. But I think the big important thing, these are kind of boring. Theme feature, we're going to look at charts afterwards, okay? So stay tuned for that. But I'm just going to

scroll down home to see what they're recommending. Now, this is day two, but this is the full day of machine learning where they're still just learning algorithms. So we're going to see some weird stuff with stuff that is going to be filtered out. You just know it just seeing it. But this is good. You got to kind of dredge up the bottom of the pond to see what kind of flakes and stuff and parramiums and amiebas come up that are just microscopic and they're never going to get any more visibility. And sometimes this freaks people out because they're not used to looking at real games that are actually on Steam. They only see the filtered real Steam games that the algorithm has has curated for them. We're going to look at some real stuff here. So, um, let's take a look here. So, again, I'm on the home day two. So, we're going to see some weird stuff. I'm just going to scroll down. Now, I'm also going to explain what it is. Um, some of the stuff she's got double guns. I uh she's got guns that are double. Uh, so some of this stuff. So, this is um this is what I mean. You just see some

weird stuff that you're just not going to see anywhere else. Okay, so this is probably randomly generated this hero thing. See, next game in 10 seconds. I think they're just randomly pulling from this thing. This is where they're exposing as many games and uh that's what this is. So just kind of fun to look at this stuff. I wouldn't make anything any too many observations here like oh man this means wolf games where this wolfy this bear dude turns into a wolf or something. No, it's just like this is just random. They're just churning up to see do people click this? Do people want to install this demo? Who knows? So don't draw too many conclusions like how do I get on the front page? Everybody's getting this stuff. This is just random. Now, on day three, four, Thursday, um we're gonna um go back. I'm gonna I've got a live stream this Friday. Link below in the comments because it's going to be a live. We're going to compare what does this Discover Nexus gameplay look like? What kind of games are being featured here? It's probably going to be a little bit more professional. And we're going to compare this to the kind

of weird stuff that we're seeing now. Stuff that doesn't typically do stuff. I always look at fingers. He's checking fingers to see if this is an AI generated capsule just to see. This is kind of horrifying. She's just like smiling while this man gets caught on fire in the back. Let's just go back to that. I always like to look at these again. Homeless life simulator. There's always a homeless life. That that looks like some stuff. This this image. She's just like she's taking a selfie and like doing the like cute egirl thing. Meanwhile, there's a guy on fire back there. This is I don't know if they intended for this, but this is She's just like, "Yeah, I did this. I got And there's like a poor man burning alive back there." And he's probably a zombie, but still, I just love all this stuff. She's smiling. I can't tell her facial expression. She's like, "Should I be smiling here while a man burns alive? Is she taking a selfie? Is that why she's doing the Who knows?" You know, weirdest stuff.

My bedside's AI generated. Don't come at me. But yeah, that I just kind of like see how I like to record how weird some of the stuff is that you see. Workhorse. I don't see any horses. Like you just see like workhorse. Where's the horse? I don't I don't know. It's not English first. Another card. Apocalypse. That kind of looks neat. Card polus cardopoulos. I'm just kind of clicking through physical train. I I love Japanese translate to English. It just it has such a poetry to it. Physical train like what's a non-physical train? I don't know. It just physical train. I just it's something poetic. It feels like dream language. I love translated stuff. Be Ricky High School. Look at that guy. He's got his hair coming out. Pompador. Is that Is this a Japanese game, too? Because they always have those guys. Have you seen those Japanese guys and they make their big hair like that? I don't know. I don't know. Look it up. Battle Thorn Reckoning. I I don't I'm

not just gonna look at this. I'm kind of obsessed with these stuff. But anyway, I recommend you just look at these things, but don't draw any conclusions based on what you see. Now, here's on your wish list. Okay. Now, I think this is an important thing because in my last video, I just I threw I'm sorry. Somebody was like, "That's uh correlation does not equal causation because I said when you have low wish lists, you don't do as well." I know. I know correlation does not equal causation. I know that, but you should still go in with a lot of wish lists. And part of this is you can't only judge that based on the data that I presented. I grant you that. Sometimes I take shortcuts. One of the reasons why you need to have a lot of wish lists to get more wish lists. Again, this is just gut and based on my own experience combined with the data that's causation versus correlation. I know. I know in the comments. I know. Don't add me. I know the difference. But see these widgets like on your wish lists. I may have forgotten about these games when I wish listed them a long time ago, but now that I'm seeing them, look, this is this is the first widget after this random

generated thing is this. Now, what this does is if you think about this, if you have a lot of wish lists, you're going to show up on more people's radars and they're more likely to play the demo. See how if I go over here and I go over and I click on this, let's say, let me let me go over and I click on this. See what it's saying? It's like install the demo. That means I am naturally when I have more wish lists, I'm going to show up in more people's widgets and I'm naturally going to get more players, which is going to move me up the ranks, which is going to uh cause more concurrent users, which more people are going to be like, "Oh, my friend, you should try this demo." You see, there's it's hard to pinpoint what it is, but when you have more wish list, you just get more visibility, and more visibility compounds. Okay, I know about causation equals correlation. Sometimes I just talk for hours and I can't monitor everything I say. But this is one of those things where it makes sense. There's a reason why going into Steam NextFest is you just get more stuff and like recommended for you. I

don't know the algorithm that Steam uses to recommend games. It probably has a to do with how many wish lists you have. So don't go into Steam NextFest without a lot of wish lists. even though I can't prove it because correlation does not equal causation. Okay. Uh but anyway, so a lot of the games you see in this list again, they just kind of look a little higher quality than some of the random stuff I was seeing in that um in that slider before. You know what I mean? When I in that first top level where they were just purely doing it. I mean, some of these you're not bunny girl. I I it looks adorable, but come on. But see, like Skate Story, I've seen that game around and it's it did very well on Reddit because it has cool graphics. It's a good uh love it when you see a game, but you're seeing much higher quality games. I I see a lot of my guess is these are high quality mixed with a couple throw in there is where they're kind of like see what folks one of the signs that I'm like this game probably isn't going to do all block level caps when it's just like island beekeeper.

Whereas a game that like this game looks a little bit more like a pro thing. See how they've like changed the letter E to have a custom E and the D looks kind of custom and there's like these look the D is bigger than the rest of the letters. Just increasing one letter to be bigger and see how the T is bigger. That tells me right away you've hired a graphical designer. So island beekeeper, you don't have to hire somebody. Your B actually looks pretty good. Just make the B of beekeeper bigger and the R bigger and it already looks like you paid for somebody. Always just make the first and last letter. See like this servant of the lake. We'll talk about this game, too. I was looking at this game. Uh, see see they they just made they just made some letters a little bit bigger. That's all it takes. But anyway, so what my thought is is this is a mix of they're popping in a couple games that are like, hey, this is we're just trying this out to see if anybody clicks on this mixed with some high quality things. See, recommended by you, recommended for you. Again, I have a feeling the games that have more wish lists are more likely to show up in this thing. Okay, just the way the machine learning algorithm. And

then um there's discovery Q which I always want to do. Maybe we could run through the discovery Q take a look at some of those things. The other thing is this is I have been playing some open world survival craft and so it's recommending this and this is why genre matters because if it's a genre that a lot of people play they're more likely there are more people who are likely to have this up there. Like I'll tell you open world survival craft is a huge genre. So if you think about all the players of Steam across the world, there's probably a lot of people who have been playing open world survival crafts. So if you have an open world survival craft, you're probably going to get more visibility. This is why genre matters. It's not just like do the game that you think you do the game that you want to build. Like I I know I in theory I love that advice, but you really have to be aware of where the industry and what people's tastes are because there's probably a lot of people with open world survivalcraft just like me. Let me see what other genres they're recommending. Or is this just open world survival crafts? Um, let's see. No, these are all

open world survival crafts that people are recommening up again. So, good for them. Oh, dark games. I don't know what my dark game that I've played. Sometimes dark is just such a weird tag that gets thrown in everywhere. But again, you see a lot of these games. So, rat human air nourish. I just kind some of these games look like maybe first time games. I don't know. Again, anytime I see the same f Oh, they've added a curve. I'm kind of like, you know, graphic designer probably didn't touch this one. This one looks good. This is a good one. White. If I see white text and different sized letters, you hired a graphic design. See this one? Yes, they added lava and stuff, but it's all block capital. see this like infinite mansion that they dropped the N the little N's different. It's custom and it's all different sizes and it's got a little border all that stuff. I'm like whoa graphic designers alert. Same thing

with this game. You just folks if you don't make your castle just hire a graphic designer at least to do the text. You can AI generate don't at me if you don't have money fine AI generate it but hire somebody to do this text because that's what makes it look like you paid somebody. Okay? Looks like you're professional. Okay, now here's the fun thing. This is where we get into the real stuff. This is the the amiebas. You're going to see stuff here that you're never ever going to see again because these games get hidden by the Steam algorithm. And this is day two stuff where they're just churning up. Who knows what we're going to see? We might face some stuff. Um, the interesting thing here that I think is neat is when you scroll down really v really really really far um you start to see um when you scroll really far uh sorry I was just I just was thinking what my next thing was. Sorry folks this is not I don't script this stuff. This is just right off the top of my head. That's why sometimes I accidentally confuse causation correlation. I don't say it

right. Anyway, um I have talked to people who have made uh festival pages and they say they get more clicks when they just have almost infinite scroll where it's very long scroll because people just scroll and scroll scroll. They don't typically click on tabs. And so what I find interesting is Steam knows this. I'm sure Valve somewhere in now Valve they know. I noticed that it's a very long scroll down. We're going to go down down down down down. We're going to go down here. Okay. Um, and that's what's interesting is Valve's kind of like, "Yeah, let's just expose as many games. You're not gonna have to click more and more and more." We're just going to keep scrolling. Okay. The other thing that I want to check before I start the down scroll. Look, I don't know. I think I've ignored 48 things or something. We're going to get rid of these. But look at this. 2,813 matches. I think this is why I do it for posterity. Last October it was like 3,000, I believe. I believe it was 3,000. See, a lot of people drop out at the last last minute, like an hour or so before Steam NextFest goes live, or even a day. There's some mistakes. Let's see how

many if I remove these filters. How many we got? 2,000. See, it's not that much of a difference. 2,884. All right, this is Chris coming back. Uh, editor Chris coming in after I edited this. And I popped back into the old screenshot I took of October's NextFest 2024 right here. Picture right here. Uh, I back then there were 2,650 games. I didn't hide those ignored items, so maybe it's another 20 or so. But anyway, that means this year there are 163 more games than there were last year. I wouldn't freak out about that. It's not like, oh, so many games. Usually 90% of those games are just absolute garbage or just not good. It's not that many different. It's about the same. Stop freaking out. Let's get back to Chris pointing at things. See you later. We might see some naughty stuff because I think I filter out for naughties. I hope not. Maybe I'll filter it. I just don't want to get demonetized

or something. I'm just already looking at pirate lady here. I don't know what's below the fold here. I'm a little afraid to scroll down. What else is below that dice? Okay. Uh let me I just again I'm a I'm okay looking at that stuff. You know me. I'll look at it. Uh, but I just don't want to share it on the stream. So, let's just see. Oh, boy. Okay, I'm going to edit this if it turns out she is. Here's Let me improve engagement. What happens if I scroll down? Do you think she's going to have something? Okay, Skullport. All right. Where's the port port of call coming in? All right. Uh, let's see if I can just hide that stuff. I just Let's see if I can filter that. I just I don't want to get demonetized, if you know what I mean here. Not that I care about because YouTube sucks. It doesn't give you any money, folks. If you're hoping like, oh man, once I get a a thousand subscribes, it gives you no money. I just I just want to spread my word as much as possible. And um

let's see if I can hide the adult stuff. I just want to just eh I'm gonna live dangerously. This isn't live. I'll just just clip. So, if you see a sudden break, that means I ran into some naughty, naughty images. Uh, if you just all of a sudden see a cut, that means I just went back in and edit it. So, we're going raw. We're going Skullport. All right. I don't even know if Skullport's adult. It's not. They just I'm telling you, it's funky. The first couple days is funky. That's why I love doing it. You know what it's like the first couple days of of Steam Nexfest is if you ever go to like a um like a flea market or something, you see some stuff in the flea markets, you're like, "Wow." You just People don't sell that kind of stuff anymore. You You never know what you're going to do. It's like vintage shops and stuff. We're We're going deep. Okay. Uh Kings subsidy. Look, see, they changed the text. He's really mad about subsidizing. He's like, "I hate subsidizing stuff." Or are we subsidizing him? I guess. Yeah, that's, you know, let's subsidize the monarch.

Get rid of that subsidy. Skullport. I don't see a skull. Where's a skull? I don't see anything. Um, I like how she's a pirate, but she still ties a nice dainty ribbon right there. She's like, you know, a little Still want to look nice on the open seas. Okay. The way of night. I love this logo. Uh, let's see. Capy bear's happy time. Yep. Barta pumping. I'm just scrolling. I don't I don't have any opinions. I just I just do it because I just like to see what's going on here. Some of these gains are you're just going to see some of the weird stuff. And I'm trying to see now already I'm already seeing some stuff in this list. Now, this is probably totally random. Just trying to seed the algorithm to see the machine learning algorithm is going to be like, "Oh, what are people clicking on?" and stuff like that. I just kind of like to see because this stuff's going to disappear. I'm already seeing some stuff that looks higher quality than what I did yesterday. Um, I always say it, but I should always do one of these on the first day. That way I get some of these. What's this one say? Dark light survivor. I love that term, dark light.

Dark light survivor. I love dark light. It's like there's a game called like heavy snow or something. I don't know. Uh, work life balance. See, the balance is you get a a cat next to you or something. Um, Dungeons and Kingdoms. Okay. Oh, I like that. Dungeons and Kingdoms. Well, down below, up high. Nights of Space Time. I've reviewed this game. I reviewed their Steam page. Um, Nights in a different night with a gun. I think that was my recommendation. Way to go. Way to improve it. Just like a night with a gun. Something's happened time time. Okay. Yeah, I remember seeing your your capsule. I think you kept the same capsule. Um, deadly robots invading a twin stick action top down shooter with in-depth gun. It's good. I think I'm pretty sure that you've changed it. Um, am Naam. Okay. Second. Cool. Cool water. The letting on this one. The distance between that and that. It's just like just this is how you know that uh the

graphic designer has not touched this one. It just feels weird to touch the bottom, but you don't have just at least you can select all the things and do distribute in a position distribute that stuff. Just like this. I don't mean to bag on you if you're cool cool water developer, but just just I don't even think these are lined up in any way. Like I can understand if you're going to line them up in an angle, but at least just there's a button called tidy up usually where you can just sort the layers and stuff. It's just that stuff that I just it's it's sweet. It is sweet. I like it. Okay. Uh anything else? Anything else that I see? Dig Island. I like to see this stuff because you kind of see these um derivative things where it's like um you'll see those dig dig a hole and island games are kind of big. So they're just like oh dig a hole on an island. I always like to see like some of these things the store games where it's like oh car trading card simulator store was big

let's do comic book store simulator. All right, processor dev tycoon. See? Well, at least they lined it up and they got equal space in between the things. Uh, but again, it's the all caps. That's the dead giveaway is when it's all caps and all the text is the same size. That's when you see like this one. Just just make that R bigger and look a little different and and customize the text. See? See this one? Yes, this one's all little caps, but look, this one looks good because they made the L bigger. That's all it takes. And they added this little fancy thing. See this little fancy line thing? That just looks so much better. Hold the mine. I know this. I think I've seen I get advertised on Reddit for hold the mine all the time. This I think this is Goblins. Goblins is really good about uh publishing on Reddit or Reddit ads. So I always see it. See kind of works, but goblins they do pretty good. Uh I'm just going down just kind of seeing what's out here. This is good. Boss simulator. So is she the boss of him

doing stuff? I I don't know. I love these. I love the ones that have more questions. After looking at the capsule, I have more questions than answers. Those are my favorite. Uh Raven. Aren't ravens usually black? Like, why is this so white? Maybe it's a story. He was like, "How the raven turned white." Skull horde. I know that is this guy's in the discord. Interested in this game? Cool. Still self-published. Interesting. I didn't know you were going for uh this. See, this is why I'm like some of this stuff is coming. It's It's better. Also, I like the I like the the rags on SK. The skeletons need to stay warm. Do they need to put on the ba jackets to stay warm or they just remembering their days before they became skeletons? Just just just questions of how this stuff works. I just wonder how skeletons work. Do skeletons get cold? Um skull horde looking good. He had a really good demolunch if I remember.

It's a demo launch or Yeah, it was a demo launch. You got a new one trending free. Did good. I should reach out to you, but thanks for being a member of the Discord. I always like to see it's like a friend coming by. But there we are. We're at the bottom of the list. Um, just a first glance. I don't take anything from this. There's nothing really to learn. I just I just like to see what's out there. What kind of games are coming? See what kind of games people are making. All right, just as I promised, I am going to look at my Discovery Q. Now, Discovery Q drives a ton of traffic. So if we are looking at this and kind of analyzing uh sources of traffic, discover Q is a huge one. People don't obsess about the discover Q enough. Now what's interesting, the other reason I'm doing this for posterity reasons to come back at it is um if you look um there's a specialized widget. It's just floating over Nextfest. You see how it's this blurry background for NextFest? They've kind of created this custom Discover Q widget. You don't go to the full page. you just get this popup pop over type of thing. So you see view store page install demo wish list ignore. Steam uses those. However I

interact with it, Steam feeds that into the machine learning algorithm. So let's see. I just saw something hover. I was just wondering if they had some background interactions that were not being masked by this popup. But here's the discovery queue. Long drive north. One thing that I noticed is a lot of games I'm getting recommended are the games we're seeing in the popular um demos, top demos. So, I'm already seeing that the the discovery what I take from this is the discovery Q is already filtering out the pure trash and a lot of the stuff is already higher quality that they're fil feeding in here. So, like Powerwash Simulator saw that on the list, saw Misery in the list, I'm pretty sure in the top demos list. Uh, friend slop. No, this is more I don't know if this is considered it's open world survival craft, but it's more friends related. Here's Tim Hooded Horse. Always the best at everything. Um, hobby horse first

ride. This game Oh, I did see this game. Ah, sorry if you heard that. Oh, great. I hit back and now I can't see it. Back to my discovery queue. Hottie Horse is a uh a horse game. Thought that was funny. Horse game. Uh, I didn't see it listed. Oh, I got a totally different. Oh, man. Sometimes the discover cube makes me mad. Uh, just clicking away changed my discovery cube. So, let's go through this one. So, again, uh, I am seeing a lot of this stuff is already feeding in similar to games you played a uh, dark. I'm just trying to see if we can see um, who the developer this is. Let's see. I don't want to click view store page because it's going to take me away from this. But we got a horror game. Um, another horror game. Final Sentence. This is that horror typing game that I talked about. Saw that on the top of the list. One of the top demos. Horror games. Hot folks. Back rooms. Horror. They probably know because Discover Q's tied to me and I saw dark was one of my most common tags. That's there. Dark

horror. It's really like, oh, this guy loves horror. Dark horror. They're really pushing the horror on me. Whoa. I swear, folks. The the discovery queue. Oh, because of dredge. I played some dredge, but not Oh, well, it really thinks I love dredge. So, it's showing so much horror here. So much horror. Sometimes the the algorithm feeds back on itself and it's like really pushing. This looks cool. World Sea battles. I did see that in the list. Um, trip to the night mall. Cool. Pixel art horror. I might I'm going to add this. What the hell? Now I'm going to get a totally different discovery queue. Let's see if it does. No, it kept that discovery cue. Um, I'm gonna add this one because I always like pixel art horror because if you wanna uh that's how I add my wish list. If you want to do a hard thing, make somebody scared of pixel art. That's I always like to see what they do for pixel art horror because that's there. Um, man, they are just really heavy hitten on the

the horror stuff. Um, yeah. So, that's it. Um, so I did view 12 because I went through the list and I was like, "Oh, I should do this." Uh, so it's there. So I did one wish list. Continue. But that's a discovery cue. You should also do the discovery queue. It's a very important widget to learn. Now back to me pointing at stuff. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the stuff that matters where we're going to start making some assumptions that aren't fully backed by data. But if you're an entrepreneur, you can't wait for perfect data that's coming from everything and statistical, you know, significant representative samples. You're an entrepreneur, baby. You got to make some judgments, some guts. You got to trust your guts and look at where the data is pointing and then make a logical leap. Even though it's not perfect, we're not trying to cure cancer here. We don't need a perfect representative sample. So, we're going to make some naughty naughty decisions that can't be proven statistically, but we're going to we're

going to make them, and that's okay. We're making video games, not curing cancer here. All right, so these are charts, and I like to look at the charts because you see what's trending. Now, here was one thing that I noticed that I feel like is different. This again, this is why I record this stuff so that I can have it for posterity sake. Um, when I can go back again, I like to look at the numbers. I think there are fewer games this October than there were last October. I'll have to go take my notes, but this is why we record it. What I did was I take every day I've been taking a screenshot of this list. So, popular upcoming I think is if they're releasing soon. If they're releasing soon and they've got enough wish list to get on there. Well, I I think it tells you. It tells you. A friend of mine told me about this. So, here it is. If you hover over it tells you what it is. Upcoming games sorted by total alltime wish list counts. Only includes games not yet released on Steam. Okay, so they're releasing soon. Sorted by alltime wish list counts. So we got of course

Tim Hooded Horse Kicking butt. Top. This game's B. I think this game's on the top of the whole list of every single list. Uh or second. It's there it is. And top demos. Freaking hoarded horse. Tim. Tim, so awesome. Uh, if you get a chance to get published by Hooded Horse, 100% endorsement, unless you're making like a hidden object game, I don't know why Tim would Tim would um back your game if you were, but man, freaking Tim. Way to go, Tim and team. Tim and Tim, hooded horse. All right. Um, but anyway, so the other thing that's interesting, the reason I do this for posterity reasons is I want to see what they how they what UI changes. And the thing that I noticed, just stay with me. It's like, oh, I'm falling. Um, okay. Um, notice how many there were tons before they did show more. Tons. Tons. Um, it's right there. This guy's in the

community. I I I'm not taking credit for this, but I begged him to put Buff Link in the capsule. Look what he did. Buff Link. I love it. Way to go, Buff Link. I not taking um full credit for that, but they did the hard work of coming up with the idea of Buff Link. I really think this game should just be called Buff Link. Check it out. It's doing well. It's in the charts. Um okay. So anyway, what I'm thinking is again I think Val what I take from this and the reason I showed the long scroll is I feel like it used to be like 10 and then you have to click more and then you see 10 more and you click more and I think Val's just realized let's just let them scroll. And so I see this as a as a good sign that they're just letting it scroll. just let it scroll. Um, and what we're going to do is we're gonna in a second we're going to switch over and I'm going to do some comparisons. Um, probably upcoming is interesting. It's mainly it's good because people who launch near NextFest. This is the one thing that I told you in the last lecture I said don't do NextFest. Don't launch your game immediately after NextFest. This is the only time I'd have to look at the data.

I could see an argument you want to launch after next because this widget gives you lots of visibility right before launch. But I don't know if this is comparable visibility to the 10 that they do on any other regular week. And I don't think it is because yes, this is impressive, but I don't know if it makes up if it's any more than the previous popular upcoming that happens any other week. Okay? So, I don't know. I don't know. But you're competing with big boys like the Hooded Horse team. Okay? Whereas if you try and get into popular upcoming on a normal boring non Nextfest week, you don't have you're not competing against Tim as much. You're competing against some big boys. Look at this Ano. You're competing against an ano game. This is some big boys. Big boys. Okay. All right. Let's look at uh trending upcoming. This is upcoming games sorted by trending or recent wish list counts. Only includes games not yet released on Steam. So this is the We never know what their trending is. People are thinking that it's like

48 hours. That's kind of my thing. It used to be like a week, like if you got a ton of wish lists in the week before, and we're talking like 10 to 20,000 wish lists in the weeks before you would show up on this list. Um, this list usually doesn't move very much throughout the year, throughout the day, I mean, um, like throughout NextFest. Like once you're on this list, you're pretty much on there. Again, you're going to see some very similar ones trending and that sort of thing. Again, it's just a long list. I'm just scrolling through the long list. I've got I do take screenshots every day of this list so I can see what's changing. And then top demos are a game sorted by their demos, daily user count using recent active data. Okay, so this is why it's good to have lots of players and long crafty strategy simulation games because those have higher play counts because people can replay the data. Okay, this top demos and we're going to look at this one. I took a screenshot of top demos yesterday and then then just before I did this call and I'm going to do this next part is where we're going to compare them and I think this top demos is where you could

actually learn something. Um because you need to compare and I want to see what demos shot up and we're going to look at it. I I did some I drew some pink lines and I want I'm interested in because usually these lists are very static like I have a feeling Tim is gonna end at the top of this list. Tim and Hooded Horse Crew um is gonna end at the top of this list by the end of the next fest. So, these lists are big boys. Like, they've got hundreds of thousands of wish lists. So, if you see a demo that shoots up this list, there's something magic about this game and we should look into it. I mean, it's still great. Everybody on this list is a winner. Even all the way down at the bottom, everybody on this list, you did good. By the way, this game kind of looks like he's flicking them off. He's like, "Yeah, I'm not going to flick everybody off." But he looks like he's flicking people off. I just saw that C. I was like, is he flicking them off or is he going thumbs up or is he going, "Hey everybody, drive that way. I'm driving down the middle. You drive left. You drive right. I'm driving down the middle." Anyway, um but anyway, what I was saying was if I see

anything pop up, move up or down this list, that's hot because these games are coming in hot. Okay, they're big boys. And so if you can move around in this list, something interesting is happening. So I'm going to flip over there and do it. The other thing that I just want you to do, here's what I want you to do. You at home, you need to understand the types of games that Steam likes. And I've written article after article about craftyability, strategy, simulation games. These are the type of games that Steam likes. Steam doesn't necessarily like a game where you're a dude with a sword and you go on a straight linear adventure and you battle bosses. What they like are these games like this remake of a Heroes of Might Magic where it's kind of an open world. You kind of explore. If you want to go down this way, you can. If you want to go down this way, you can. You just do anything. The crafty build openw world survival games. Um some horror I think that's horror uh typing games. These friend slop type of things. Now that we're

going to talk about this one, one of the outliers puzzle game doing really good. This is we're going to put a star on this one. Put a star in Servant of the Lake. Put a star. But you'll see a lot of just gut feel and you should play all these demos everybody. Just you got to understand what kind of game does well on Steam. A lot of strategy openw world customizable co-op playing with each other type of co-op friends sloppy type of games. Racing actually does pretty well on Steam. I don't call out racing enough just cuz I don't understand it. Racing does pretty well, but you'll see here's another racing. a lot of like open stuff crafting tags and then you'll see of course some like brand name IP stuff. This game actually does pretty well. It's kind of racing but it's graphics are really good. I saw a lot of stuff on Reddit. A lot of sports and I love this this Yeah. Oh yeah. I love bad mitten so

much. This guy loves bad mitten. I don't know if anybody is that excited about Batman, but he sure is. I love that guy. He's so into a bad mitten. Like, is this good or bad? Like, he's is he is he happy because his friend like got it out? I always think bad I think it's like a fun day at the park, you know? It's like, hey, let's have a barbecue and play some bad mitten or something like, "Hey buddy, you want to come over here and we're gonna throw a couple dogs on the grill and play some bad?" Uh, okay. Um but anyway um but yes it's a lot of that's kind of what it is like these auto battler strategy games now there is look a 2D platformer or a 3D platformer but guess what kind of platformer it is you have to basically have been around since the '9s and kind of be a punch line for the longest time Bubsy was a punch line. People used to hate 2D platform because they're like it was Mario Sonic and then everything else

was just character slop and Bubsy was like the lowest of the low character slop. you're like, "Oh, yeah, like another character game like Bubsy." And now he's on the front page of Steam. So, way to go, Bubsy. Um, but again, these these 2D platformer things I just don't 3D platformer stuff, unless you're Bubsy, it doesn't work. But here's crafting, city builder, tavern crafter, builder, open world, survival, craft, strategy. Okay, this probably a this is probably a 3D platformer. If you have the IP, you do okay as 3D platformer. If you don't have the IP, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Karen is kind of an one of the ex um really novel kind of a I consider this a 3D platformer, but it's got this really novel mechanic type of thing. But in general, sports games doing pretty good. What I'm seeing here is the old crafty building strategy simulation with some horror stuff. some horror stuff thrown

in there, but um for the most part, I mean, they're there. Friends slop is still doing really well. Uh these games that only come out in China that do very well. These FMVs, I think this is one of these SMB romantic dating. No, no, no, no. Never mind. This one is a strategy simulation strategy game. Um more friend slop. Um let's see. We get that. I think that's co-op cooking slop docked simulation game with a bluecollar job. You know that it doesn't change very often folks. Most of these games I'd say the new thing mainly stuff comes in where it's like here's friends slop. Uh that's really picking up but it's not as much. Um so there we go. Yeah. Just like it's it's not too surprising what I see in here. So um all right. See there it is. Okay. This is it. I just had to do a cut because I had to like dig into my files. Anyway, so here we are. Now, what you're looking at is, like I said, I knew this would make me mad. Um, let's

see. So, what we're looking at in a very weird way, let me scroll over. There's no good way to just have a giant list of an image. So, what I did was I took two images. This is day one of Steam Nextfest. This is day two of Steam Nextfest and I'm interested in where did they go. Now what I did is I drew some very sloppy pink lines here. So this is day one, no change. Sam and Hodor doing awesome. Now the top games usually when a game's doing well, it does so so well. So it's very hard for it somebody to overcome it. So you're going to see more moving around down below because there's the the games are more tightly clustered. So, all they have to do is increase by a couple maybe hundred or 200 concurrent users and they'll shoot up the chart or drop rapidly. Now, if you're on the list and you were in day one and you disappeared off the list, I love you. There's no problem with that. You won. That's good. You did a good

job. So, please, if you're like, "Oh, look at that game fell off the list. Look at that. What a loser." No. Everybody who got on this list is a winner. I'm just interested in who's changing. Now, if a game like final sentence flip-flops and goes up to here, that's okay. Or if down, again, this is probably a difference of like a 100 concurrent users and so they just flop around. That doesn't I don't think that's interesting. What I find interesting are the big leaps. And this is what I'm thinking. See, day two, Servant of the Lake. Look at how far this came on day one. It was down here and it jumped how many slots? See that pink arrow going? I'm gonna play Servant of the Lake. And I think it's interesting because it's a puzzle game and it did awesome. That this means to me word of mouth is happening. Content creators I haven't checked content creators who's playing servant of the lake but I also think it's interesting because it's a puzzle game and I think this is every next fest there's always one puzzle game that pops off. The other one that I remember was um is the seat taken which did very well. And so usually to do well as a puzzle game

because there's so many puzzle games you have to be very interesting very cool art style. It's a very kind of like Wes Anderson, very static 2D thing. I got to look into who made it. Probably some famous puzzle designer or something. Very interesting. It is so hard to do a puzzle game. This is the only puzzle game I think in the top list. So, there's always one and it's really good. So, I'm going to try it out. I think I don't even know if Blueprints was in NextFest, but anyway. So, I'm just kind of looking. Yes. I mean, oh, Misery dropped a few slots. I don't think that's that interesting. It's these big things. So, I'm just putting in a pin because I always like to play demos and you all should too. I always like to play demos to see what's trending. Definitely. Servant of the Lake is going on my list of games to try because I'm just like, what is going on? Why is this game popping off? The other one, look at this one. IRA jumped super far. IRA, the one where the guy's like flipping everybody off. He's like, yeah, the best racer. Or he's going, "You left, you right." Or the guy going,

"Yeah, thumbs up." I can't tell what is going on with his fingers, but look at how far this jumped. All the way from down here all the way up to here. Woo! That's interesting. I'm going to play our racing. I kind of like racing games are fun. So, we'll try that. Um, Master of Command did okay, but jumped. Cloudheim fell. I don't I don't think falling isn't as interesting. I always like to look on the bright side. Why didn't do it? Um, this game came out of nowhere. All right, put new if it didn't even have a if it wasn't on the list the day before. So again, these racing games are really hot. Racing games do well in Xfest and on Steam in general. Um, car service together. I think this is a co-op blue collar. Is it racing simulation? So again, these simulation games where you're building a car together. I can just look at the slope of this line and tell it's coming up from low. It can it jumped a number of slots too. Car service together. Again, I have a feeling this is why I think it's important. This is probably word of mouth. A lot of people play it on day one and they'll like just saw this and

they're like, "This is fun. Let me go call my friend." And they call their friend and they say, "Let's play this game together." And they're playing. That's word of mouth. I have a feeling word of mouth is a big one on this one. Um, so let's keep going down. I'm just looking for stuff that's got a very uh big slope. Power Washer 2, way to go. But I mean, it fell, but it's not like didn't fall that far. Don't don't overread that stuff. Um, so Car Service Together, I think, is an interesting one. the the puzzle game, that puzzle game that we were talking about, iRacing. So, those three are interesting games to check out. I check them out. Just I like to see are they doing anything cool marketing wise because it's really hard to boost up that way. So, I want to look to see what are they doing, what what kind of cool things are they doing. Um, Ultimate Sheep uh raccoon, that's Ultimate Chicken Horse was the previous one. So, kind of a sequel. It has a very steep line. They jumped up. Global Rescue also interesting. Simulation strategy sandbox building might be interesting. Global. Look at how steep the line is for Global Rescue. That was a That was a big one. Um, good old Buff Link. It fell, but

don't worry, don't freak out. You did good. Buff link. Um, Oaken Tower. I think this one's interesting because pixel art. Anytime something pixel art, it is auto battler. I'm always interested in auto battlers. It's a good genre. It jumped too. So, Oaken Tower is one that I'm going to be trying out playing sometime. Bubsy 4D. See, everybody's like, "Oh, Bubsy." And then Daisy like, "Do you want to play?" Eh, don't over interpret when a game falls. Don't overtake it. Uh, let's see what else happened here. Let's see if there's Tavern Keeper did pretty well. Tavern Keeper games are always pretty good. Astrobotanica, new popped on the list from nowhere. Um, let's see. Anything else come up? The Legend of Kimori. This uh Spongebob game popped in. Karen popped out of nowhere. This one's going to be hot, too, I have a feeling. So, we see some stuff uh popping up. Let's see. Star Sand Island came up. Is that a farming game? Life sim farming sand. You know what? Star, the word star in there.

You got this. And you have two people just kind of looking over their land. See what I mean? You can just tell the genre with like just a title and a thing. I know Star Sand Island sounds very cliche, but did did you not see it? I swear I didn't know. It's a farming game. I just knew it based on star plus a piece of land. Valley, island, peninsula. What if they did star peninsula? I would be like farming game. It's You're not trying to be as unique, folks. You're not trying to be as unique. Paddle Together. There's another paddle game. The guys in my Discord. I got to ask him, "What do you think about Paddle Together?" Another friend slot paddling game. They probably saw the success of this other guy's game called Paddle Paddle Paddle. And that is a fast follower. They're like, "Damn it, they stole my idea." Interesting. Um, this Chinese strategy game, Wizard Cats, Semi, and Monsters Coming. So, I like to play the ones that just popped into the day two because they probably had something. So, um, those are what the games I'm going to be playing, those new

incomers that just shot out of nowhere. Um, so I'm not going to play them live on stream. Those numbers, people don't like to watch me play video games. They just like to watch me point at stuff on my screen. So, I'm not going to play them live, but I invite you to play them because you really should. people. Folks, I see so many games that are in the wrong genres and dev spent so many years working on games that the Steam audience just doesn't want. And then you look at these and people want these. They want these type of games. So, you should be playing these games to kind of understand what is the Steam audience wanting? What's the type of game that Steam players like? And you you just learn it from just doing this this process like this craziness right here. Um, anyway, that's it. So, that's it. Um, don't forget Friday live Q&A. I'm going to answer questions. We're going to look at your numbers. You can share your numbers about whether you're you got sidelined because on Friday you'll know what happened on Thursday. Thursday is usually when you know whether you got buried by Steam or not.

Um, also I'm I've got a discount on my course also linked below. So, both the live Q&A registration is down below and the um uh the course that is also linked below. So, try those out. And that's it. So, thank you so much for watching my uh videos and have a good day. Bye bye. I hope you find something. I hope you play some free games. I hope you learn something about yourself. Bye. Badman.