Why does Steam Next Fest look like that?

[Music] all right this is Chris sukowski coming at you to look at steamfest 2025 February Edition happy Fest Day to all who celebrate we're going to go through I'm going to teach you kind of like what to do about this next Fest what it's meaning and I'm not gonna kind of Deep dive I'm going to look at the front page I like to record the front page because it changes every day I'll get to that but that's what I'm here to do I'm just going to kind of look at see what's going on with the next Fest let's see what's going on all right so let me just give you a quick briefing so you get a little context when when people see the front page of nextfest they kind of freak out a little bit because in the new world what people do what steam does is they show you basically every game and I actually had a couple journalists contact me and they're like Chris what why is there so much just AI garbage on the store and I was like well that's that's the the real drags of steam like this is unfiltered steam when you start looking at the first few days of nextest

we'll get there um I probably actually missed I should have done this yesterday but I was really busy um okay this is my this is my chart for how many games are released now every time somebody says 18,000 games are released every year that's kind of a little bit reactionary okay so what I did is I've done research where I look at how many reviews typically these games get there is a huge proportion most of this 18,000 games that are on Steam every year well last year and the year before I think it was 15,000 16,000 no I think it was 13,000 anyway it's it's just stuff you've NE like you will never see and it is like AI generated is my first game some of this stuff I'm like have these people ever actually seen a video game before it is like weird Outsider Art that by you've never seen stuff like this and the way steam nextfest is working now is they just put it all out there now when people say when they people scan steam they just see this top I would say like

top four brackets you see this is like 3 to 4,000 games and that's been consistent over time about 3 to 4,000 games that I consider like you know a typical video game that's done by an artist and you know looks legit people aren't aware of how much they are so when I say 18,000 they assume when they browse steam they see this and whenever you just browse steam this is what you see you see these games and so they see that these pretty games pretty look pretty good right and so when people say 18,000 games are released every year thinking it's 18,000 of this oh no oh no it is like I'd say like 15,000 of the weirdest crap you've ever seen and that's crap is not disparaging I mean crap as in like you know CRA uh but anyway so it's not it's not three Thou You're not competing you're competing with like 3,000 people the rest there and this unfiltered steam that you're seeing in the first few days and we'll go through it is this stuff and it's shocking to people how weird

games can be I see it all the time because I deep scrape steam I use steam analytic tools like steamdb or I use VG insights and so I do a lot of filtering because sometimes I when I do these reports I check to make sure that I'm not accidentally getting games that like are actually like real competitive games that get somehow thrown into this pile oh no oh no it is it is the weirdest stuff you've ever seen um so I'm I'm kind of used to it and so when I see it on the front page of Ste like oh they bringing that stuff up and that just kind of goes to show like steam if you just fire up the front page of steam and you do like two or three levels deep you're still not seeing this stuff this stuff is deep SE it's like whenever they like dredge the bottom of like the ocean and they get some weird sea creature that has like a tentacle coming out of its face and like it's got like a mouth on the side it is weird stuff that's what it's like down here okay so get ready we're going to go through some of that stuff we're going to look at it now um the reason steam nextfest is dredging the up is steam nextfest has actually

become quite egalitarian and the the way the steam algorithm Works um in general their favorite kind of algorithm to use is is is what what you see in discover que now this is something totally different there's a little bit of discover q and we'll go through my Discovery Q when we do this analysis but see how it's DQ you see Discovery Q that's what this is this is one widget within Steam but this algorithm actually is used a similar form of it is used everywhere now what Discovery Q does when you launch your game they show you a certain amount of times to certain numbers of people and if you do well they show you more and if you don't do well they hide you and I did a survey you can read the full blog post I link to it down below you'll notice on the first two days when your game launches you get around somewhere about 2,000 25,000 views 25 to 35,000 I saw games really tightly cluster in this little group those are the first two days first two days each day you get about 25,000 impressions in this thing

called the Discover Cube if they if valve likes what they see like I don't even know what numbers they're tracking like conversions wishlists not ignores whatever it is they pump your views up the next few days so day three for these games these blue games are games that make millions of dollars look at how much traffic they get they 70,000 views whereas before they basically doubled your impressions and then they keep going up and up and up and if you're still hanging on here they they'll give you so much visibility by the final few days it's it's amazing um but if you look at some of these games like this gold tier which is still good I would still totally uh love to have a gold game they they usually make about 150,000 to about maybe 300,000 um that's what this uh gold tier is you'll notice that the second day they kind of go up not not a whole lot but they still the valve algorithms the steam algorithms are like yeah pretty good let's let's give you more and then they're like yeah okay we we got you we see the numbers are kind of doing but they it's a soft fallof um the next one is uh silver these are the games that are like under

150,000 to about 30,000 they get some Impressions but it's a it's a faster Decay than the gold games okay now the brown the bronze games which is this brown bar notice that gets 572 they did not meet that minimum requirement that's typically what we call about 7,000 wish lists a huge number of players those 10 reviews this is why if you just go to steam most of the time you don't see the bottom of the ocean stuff that I was talking about where you see like a guy with a tentacle coming out and a mouth on the set of his face those like weird sea creatures that's because steam hides them this is why you have to Market your game because you need to at least get into this Baseline of consideration for the discovery que but anyway so this is how the steam algorithm they they love this algorithm and this is what steam nextfest really is doing right now the essential of this okay so what they're doing is they're testing out a bunch of games and to steam's credit and I actually think this is good I know it looks weird some you're going to see some weird stuff on there but to steam's credit credit what they're kind of doing

is like they're erasing this brown tier and they're saying everybody is eligible for this everybody has a right to a certain Baseline of visibility and so what we're doing in this one day and day two this is day two this is a Tuesday we're in this kind of just try it out we're just going to give enough views to kind of fill up you know statistical you know relevance you got to fill it up you got to expose all these games valve could have done some filtering but they're not they're not doing any filtering they like every game gets equal eyes in the in the eye of Sauron or the eye of Gabe every game gets it and so that's where we are and so that's why I kind of want to capture this video now you're going to see some weird stuff but I'm seeing already day two a lot less weird than day one next next Fest remind me day one as soon as it hits I'm going to start scanning steam to see the real tentacles coming out of the face okay so with that um that's what it is and we're going to go through it so I'm going to flip over on my mag picture

here and I'm going to switch over to steam nextfest now I've been kind of browsing a little bit and this is on my personal account so some of the games that I've played are going to influence the algorithm and I think that's an important thing to see so you can see how the algorithm changes because there is a little bit of like not filtering but prioritization based on what I play that's how the steam algorithm Works um I did hide the NSFW I normally don't because again I am a curator of steam like I want to understand what it is I normally go with the naughty bits out um you know like opted in I don't filter anything thing but because this is being posted on YouTube I filtered out the NSFW so that I don't get like I don't know demonetized or something I don't even know if that would happen if I saw some of that stuff so I just you're not going to see any of the uh the naughty bits um so that'll be censored but hey it's fun turn it off just see what's going on all right so let me switch over um while I'm switching over my name is Chris owski I write for this website called how tomarket game.com get your free book while I'm switching over how to Market game.com slf free 60 marketing mistakes you don't want to you don't want want to get okay here's the deal

don't subscribe to my Channel please don't YouTube sucks okay everybody YouTube sucks don't subscribe to me this is what I want you to do join this this is so much better than subscribing to YouTube YouTube sucks you're watching too much of it after this video Just Close YouTube you got work to do stop watching so much YouTube okay so when you finish this video just close the whole browser and we'll do that okay so let's let me um flip over real quick to steam while we're doing this while you're logging in Saving that typing in how tomarket game.com free let me pull up steam and we're going to browse steam together we're going to look at the weird bits we're going to look at it okay and some of the reason I'm doing this is just for you know posterity so we can kind of look back on on what steam's going on how they change over the years um because it this store really changes a lot so I just went to steam nextfest right here on the front and one of the first things I I can't remember and this is why I'm doing these videos this seems kind of new and this

is kind of like a light Discovery cue what I'm seeing here and what it is is it's just this thing where I just hit this next button right here next Fest and I just get another game look just you could just click this I was clicking this a lot and I didn't see the same game twice now when I was looking through these these games are looking good like these look like the types of games that are like I talk about the 3,000 to 4,000 games that are actually released every year that you're actually competing against when you make a game on Steam I'm thinking steam's already been filtering out the like true bottom of the barrel stuff like this stuff's pretty pretty dang good and I was looking to see if there's anything where it's like rules for how they're filtering sometimes steam will actually put a little thing like we are recommending this game because you like whatever I'm not seeing that I'm I'm imagining that it's just a lot of like you know hey this game's getting some good traction a lot of people are playing it for a long time I think within a day steam has already filtered out and again I just I it was it was

kind of funny and kind of like a lot of people were like angry at steam they're like how dare you show this garbage game this is a not this game not this game specifically like a theoretical how dare you share these G awful looking games AI generators no not a big I'm not totally into AI art I just mean like they were like offended that steam would show somebody else's game but here's the thing is like that's that's what steam's doing is they have no idea and and valve and steam they're trying to they're just kind of like in the market to decide so they're just like no gatekeeping on that first day and people are like no you shouldn't be showing this stuff this is bad and it's like well how do we know if it's bad the market decides the market All These Eyes giving their opinions on stuff will filter that stuff out in the theory of steam and for my sake I I like it because people are always asking me how do I get on Steam and it seems like so much of steam is like well you have to have 7,000 wish lists well how do you get

them well you have to have a good game that gets visibility and with that visibility you roll it into and people are like well how do I get that for it's like it's hard to start the pump to get rolling and this is what starting the pump looks like letting some games again none of these these are all looking good but um people really offended by some of these games and it's not like we can just have a check mark that says only show good games like nobody knows the market has to say what a good game is if you ask me is my Chris is my game good I don't know I really I mean I have some opin but I some stuff that succeeds on Steam I would have never thought and if I was in charge of steam and I was filtering stuff i' would been like get this game out of here people love it and so who Am I who am I judge but yeah I'm thinking all these games look good okay but a couple things I see trailer first um couple thoughts that I have on Steam NEX notice how much the trailer is taking up this is why I always say gameplay gameplay gameplay if you have a catic trailer you can see how valve is really prioritizing stuff really prioritizing in um the trailer the video you have to

have a trailer that people should I really get a trailer yes get a trailer get a trailer um I'm seeing some tags so make sure your first five tags see all these tags these first five tags are very important they tell the genre don't put Indie in there NOP they don't have India in that thing India again India is just such a generic tag so other five tags um and then there's a little wish list star this always bugs people that you can do this because that you can just highlight this in wish list without going to the page because it it messes with your numbers people are always like well what's my clickthrough rate forget if you're nextfest and you're trying to study your data forget about clickthrough rate it doesn't matter there's too many ways that you can wish list because this will I think this counts as an impression and then a wish list so it completely bypasses a view so again your click-through rate is bad data so don't even care about click-through rate just look at wish lists it's a much more practical way of saying are people interested in this game okay so um we get some stuff on the

on your wish list um this is really cool this is why having a lot of wish list before you enter nextfest is important because you get a second dose of visibility on your game people are willing to play your demo so why I always recommend last nextfest before you launch because you're going to have the most wish list going in um a lot of these games I found in nextfest and so I wish listed them I'm going to be playing some of these um I've got um game marketing ideas and on my channel I'm going to play a couple games I'm going to have some let's plays on here some of these demos because I like to show here's how you make a good demo people always always like how much demo should I do should I do 30 minutes an hour how much if you're making a game and you're thinking I'm going to do nextfest in a little bit like um I'm going to do the one in June or something you should be going to town and playing every single demo even the weird ones that are dredged up from the bottom of the ocean with the weird tentacle in the mouth on the side of their face you should be playing those games play the demos get ideas see what people are doing you should be doing that right now during this whole next Fest do your research um but what I'm saying is um some of these are really cool demos and I will be playing them but as you can see um you

see all how having wish list going in nextfest just kind of again gets that fly wheel gets the pump going so you get more visibility now recommended for you there's no reason and see how it has one hidden hidden because it's nutty I don't know why they recommended a naughty game for me I I've never played a naughty game I gota be honest um so uh yeah these are I don't know why they don't recommend here's the discovery queue we're going to talk about this this is that chart that I showed with all the the the gold diamond tiers they're doing discover queue just for steam Nexus so there's another way of doing Discovery there I'm gonna keep going I will do the discovery queue for this video just give me a second I'm going to go to the full um stream page and then we're go down there and we'll do we're going to look at all of steam next us then we're going to go up back to Discovery Cube so farming games I don't know why I haven't I actually oh you know what it is the last two games that I've been playing are uh

dredge dredge and um Rusty's retirement which is an idle farming game and the games that they're recomending recommending to me are Idol or are uh farming games and fishing games they're like this guy loves to harvest food from the land but it's really those are the last two games I've sent significant time to what that tells me is steam is very much prioritizing most recent tag activity um I it's it's really amazing like the last seriously the last two games I played was a fishing game and a farming game okay and they're doing it they're they're really pushing these games on me so here's farming games and says because you've played games tagged with farming that was Rusty's retirement that Idol game and again folks this is why you have to be on genre Trends because people are playing games and their current playing style is influencing what games they're shown that's why you have to be aware of what games are trending and what people games are playing so look at that there's only two curated things again I think there are more farming games but I think

steam's putting some filtering on here um fishing games here's those fishing games that are getting recommended to me because of dredge uh because of all the time I've been playing dredge they're just fishing games again look at all these capsules just a general gut sense these capsules are looking pretty good not too much of that that junk stuff now all titles now this is a weird thing and I I just scrolled scrolled scroll scrolled scrolled scrolled again I'm I'm seeing this now compared to yesterday I should have done a video yesterday I should have was just really busy um these games are all looking fairly competent I'm telling you folks like the stuff that these journalists were asking about I was like that's steam that's that's the bottom layer of steam I'm not seen it all these games look competent like they're they're they're not like the weirdest stuff like I'm serious folks it was like I saw one the capsule level was like the guy's two kids just a picture of two kids it I don't even know what they were in the game I think the guy was just like hey I made a game with my kids that's a common thing people do here's

my two kids who made it and I was like that's that's a really weird capsule it was just two kids uh weird um uh but again yeah all this stuff I'm seeing totally competent totally competent nothing really weird I've seen some of these games before it's just a really long list doesn't seem like any sorting or anything like that again I think steam is just in this mode where they're just like we're going to show you all this stuff and whoever wins out of these is going to do it I think this is actually good this is Mor palarian this is where steam is going with steam nextfest um that's that's that's where we are okay so let's do the discovery que this is my third time around the discovery queue and we're going to see what is getting recommended to me now the way the discovery queue works is they have about 11 games it depends you can see these these games that are dot dot dot dot dot dot here those are the 11 games that they're done and then they give you the tags I thought they oh it's loading I hope I have internet I hope I have internet usually it shows a short description here I don't know why it's loading Maybe maybe it's a steam problem maybe it's my internet problem but

anyway uh trailer again so this is one of those games again these journalists were like what's with all these games about managing a shop I'm like okay those games are incredibly popular um this I'm not gonna say if anything's AI I don't want to disparage anybody if they are um but yeah it's just a management game it's a management game where you manage a shop classic stuff on Steam these journalists who are used to console games I just they're not they're a little they're a little out of the touch but that's the way it goes um okay so that's that oh so here it is um this is the way a discovery key works um you can ignore the game wish list it download the demo and I think again I don't know what Discovery Q monitors to determine what's a good game or not but some mix of whatever I interact with down here is going to trigger the algorithm to say ah this game's getting good interactions a lot of people are wishlisting cinemaster we should be showing cinemaster more remember that game the the blue bar the diamond tier

kept going up if the game is getting positive interaction they keep showing it more and more if a game's getting ignored a lot um where is that ignore button you see that that this little X is too many people put that I have a feeling if I was like yikes put that down and so I have a feeling that first day a lot of garbage was coming up and there was getting a lot of ignor so those kind of games probably with a guy with a p two pictures of his kids probably got all ignored a lot um nightclub simulator again these games are so hot where you just stock shelves and the I feel funny but this journalist was like they're just they're just games about stocking shelves I was like that's hot that is so hot right now it really is where else do you stock shelves at a nightclub all right um the bib bites Digital Life I have no idea well that's a lot of information there but again your your trailer it's just it's just they just do your full trailer that kind of stuff um descenders next this is a a popular game a sequel I think it normally shows a a short description here I think there's just some steam

weirdness going on but again that's why your short description and your tags in your trailer are so important and your capsule and outlawed looks like some sort of mooba type of thing or oh it's an extraction shooter Yep looks very extraction shooter see how I have to look really quick people have a second to judge if they like that genre or not and then they click it um here's some farming type of game 2D management game classic Centrum pixel Graphics 2D exploration indie I don't like these tags oh look it's loading stuff oh yeah it's like loading what friends I know who play it again this is that kind of information valve loves to push forward um yep that's a lot of see this is why you don't want that kind of like lead in stuff with your logo and all this stuff before just get to gameplay because when I'm trying to judge whether I like this game or not every second counts um I'm just going to keep hitting next I'm just trying to show this Beholder conductor I actually know these devs talked to them a little bit but there's another Beholder game I when I saw this I was like oh another Beholder game um so

again um you see how you see the friends there uh friend recommendations um bookbound that's kind of cool a lot I'm kind of a fan of management games I kind of I just like how they're they're simpler management games are simpler to make I'm not saying they're easy but they're simpler than they but they have that long gameplay and very popular especially if you go cozy with it I I'm going to maybe try this game so I'm going to wish list this so I'm just going to show you what happens you just put this little wish list button here um and so that just triggered that bookbound data now ah shoot um there's my Discovery que okay it returned the last Discovery queue just restart it that's I don't like that UI very much but bookbound um Seekers of syville looks a lot of punching fwn Town farming game with a cat let's keep going City Tales Medieval Era this is like kind of like a city Builder medieval very similar to that um thing okay so here's the end of this this is what's interesting so steam reports um stats

I've done this 36 I've seen 36 games because I did it I guess it's 12 because I did it three times today so 3 * 12 is 36 it says I've wishlisted five games and I've ignored zero what this reporting tells me it's not who cares what I do but that tells me valve is kind of thinking like these I think are some important stats like how many wish lists did these games get if if steam's reporting the stat that means they're tracking the stat which means they're probably feeding it into the algorithm so I think they're looking at how many wish lists how many ignores do these games get and then they respond either either by hiding that game or showing that game more that's how it works um and so that's what they're doing so that's it um that's a discovery queue it is very critical even if you don't I I talked to a lot of devs are like I've never used the discovery queue who cares about the discovery queue my me and my my friends use the discovery queue let me tell you once you study the stats you will see Discovery que drives so so much visibility especially at launch um I'll be running a survey for this next Fest

and we're going to find out how much of this discovery queue is showing uh is leading to traffic from games okay but again a discovery queue is another reason you should not worry about the clickthrough rate because it's too complicated it's like just you probably if you've got a game in nextfest you're probably nervous and you don't know what to do with yourself so you're like checking stats you're refreshing the stats and then this leads to this like analysis paralysis where these devs are like looking through like trying to be a little detective like oh man look at the clickthrough rate on the tags page what is the tags page how do I optimize for the tags page just relax relax this is your next Fest if there's anything you should be doing it should be just contacting streamers most of the streamers are probably done they're already booked up so it's too late but what else are you going to do stop looking at your stats just in the first in the morning when steam refreshes them usually 10: a.m. Pacific time is when they update their stats check your wish list then everywhere else just monitor your your um your boards to see if any's

posting maybe your Discord if people are redirecting to your Discord check those make sure nobody's having any support problems or anything keep up with that be a good citizen don't yell at people but stop checking the stats don't don't invest too deeply just care about the wish lists everything else can figure out later okay um all right so one other thing I want to show is these are the big sections so home is what I just did for you is a little bit more um this is where you're gonna see my farming and fishing fandom um where again I don't play these games that much it's just I played them a lot in the last two weeks or so so that tells me that steam let's just see how much of this is so for you um yeah far it's all farming say the farming it's Farming Farming Farming Farming building is that idler yep farming idler it was idler it's an idler farmer that I was playing so of course you're like oh he loves idling games

Farming Farming Farming so what this is telling me is steam heavily heavily weights your your most recent plays that's just what I'm really taking from this so if you see there's wish list again I think these lists are just more heavily weighted to what I've been playing fishing and farming here's your farming Chris here's your fishing Joy like it's it's not a complicated algorithm it's there I do play some automation I think maybe because the idler was called automation the um rusties was tagged with that um so there's your idlers it's just basically what have been playing the last two weeks are those two types of games all right um by genre this is for people who are like well I can't find any games I speci this is where they filter it based off of this it's Sub sub genres and stuff like that don't freak out a lot of people are like what's the genre that I don't think these pages are as popular and it's such weird genres that they picked I think this is just kind of Legacy stuff don't freak out about this stuff don't freak out it

doesn't matter there's theme feature you know VR and stuff I think these middle three they're just like I don't know we're going to throw this now here comes this stuff so charts this used to be on the front page of steam like when you first pulled up steam nextfest it was this chart well you scroll down just a little bit and then they would show this chart and this is what made it winner um um winner take all is and this was the old strategy was you was try and pump your numbers up so you ended up on one of these three tabs which is trending upcoming um popular upcoming and top demos so trending upcoming meant how did you do in the last like two weeks um popular upcoming means I think if you're releasing soon you get it again another reason to wait till the last one just before you release and then the last one is just top down was like raw numbers now before I think steam adds another little widget here later in the next Fest it kind of evolves I kind of I kind of like this is my final form type of thing like steam nextfest evolves I'm

probably going to do another one of these videos later this week maybe tomorrow if I see a significant change but see how they kind of left a little space I think they do like a most wishlisted as part of this festival thing we'll see we'll see what they do um but this is where you see the real top demos and stuff like that here's a here's a thing I always like to get a sense of what the genres are because you know I always do this genre research and stuff like well what are the top genres um couple things most ly crafty ability simulation strategy mostly multiplayer games like this is a free multiplayer from a big company um but a couple things like yes you got Dune up here but this is why I still have confidence in Steam look at all this stuff a lot of these games are just Indie ass indie games made by like a couple people and they're on the top of the charts they're almost beating Dune uh so it's that's why I like steam is it really does it's not just like all these big companies and you we'll see some big properties that are lower than some really po like Game of Thrones

look I mean you might be like well that game sucks that's why it sucks but it's Game of Thrones is lower than all these inds Indie this game is the almost I think that game is pixelart a pixel art game is beating Game of Thrones that's where I'm like Steam and the fan base on Steam just just love games they don't care if it's just like a Game of Thrones Game okay um I don't know if the Game of Thrones sucks I'm not trying to liel anybody I just mean like that's the response well the game sucks that's why so low I don't know um so anyways so as you can see these are the just trending games and again look at the genres see what genres they're there mostly crafty ability uh there is one really cool this one's doing very well it is a platformer but it has the most amazing visual look and this fast like fisheye lens look again to be a platformer that succeeds you basically have to reinvent an art style and haste has reinvented an art style there is no other platformer that looks like this and there's some other

Platformers I'm actually going to play this game I played it today there's a platformer made by devolver that's cool but I don't see it on the list and it like devolver where's devolver on this list no devolver is not got some hot stuff on here I just I don't know um but anyway so that's that's the basic um I'm going to play a lot of these games but you really it you see so many different types of genres on here it really is that's why I love steam they they they they spread it out it's not all just like idlers or something so many different genres so many size developers of all sizes are getting these top lists um I know it's hard it really is hard um and then uh it's hard totally is hard I'm I'm not discounting that um but what are you gonna do um so that's it that's that's what we got oh here's live streams um this used to be a big thing and then they realized developers hate being on camera and like emoting so they're like maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal out of these live streams uh so they

just relegated to this back thing I think you can schedule it but it doesn't matter these don't really matter um so that's steam Nexus that's my thing so what did we learn uh first really um pushing games that you've played recently two it it's weird the first couple days of steam Nexus are weird you're GNA see weird games that you don't normally see I've already seen what I see is in day two everything I saw was pretty competent I didn't see anything where I'm like why are there two children on a steam capsule I don't know uh didn't see any of that so I that tells me they've steam's already filtered the like truly weird stuff um and three I don't know what's something tell me something good tell me in the comments yeah in the comments put something that you observed About Steam nextfest and then finally don't subscribe to this channel do not subscribe I don't care about YouTube it sucks YouTube sucks join my mailing list how tomarket agame.com free you get a free book what do you get when from when you subscribe to YouTube nothing you don't get

anything if you subscribe to howar Market game.com free you get a book and here's the thing you've got games to make you've got stats to obser way obsess over more than you should stop watching YouTube close this browser just close YouTube you've watched enough YouTubes you know enough about video games just start making something do something that's not watching YouTube okay so close YouTube don't subscribe to my channel YouTube sucks I'll see you later all right have a great day that's a positive have a great day I want you to go outside all right bye [Music]