What’s New With Steam Next Fest – Bullet Point Summary of Steam Next Fest changes based on the recent Q&A sessions

NOTE: Guest Article written by Mateusz Kupilas, we asked him if we could host the info he recapped in this Twitter post.

Valve recently hosted 3 Q&A sessions on their Steamworks Development Youtube channel. We highly encourage you to watch them yourself, but if you don’t have the 3 hours (or just prefer to read), maybe this summary will be useful to you.

  1. Next Fest Q&A August 2024
  2. Next Fest Q&A September 2024 (10am PT session)
  3. Next Fest Q&A September 2024 (5pm PT session)

This summary mixes them together as a lot of topics overlap between the Q&A sessions (especially the 3rd one).

  • Next Fest preview page. Check if you can find your game there. This is important: if it does not show up, your game may be tagged wrong, or there are some other issues and you should open a ticket via Steam support. Link to the Next Fest preview page: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest_preview (this preview page may be offline at times: they also mentioned this during the Q&A).
  • Live streams will not be as important as they used to be in previous fests. There will be no live stream schedule with reserved slots. It is still beneficial to stream the game (or just stream a prerecorded video), as there will be a section for this during the festival, but it should not be as impactful as it used to be. If you use a prerecorded stream: it’s recommended to add some info that it’s prerecorded, so people do not get frustrated if they try to interact with it via chat.

NOTE: Check our article on Steam Broadcasts Best Practices!

  • If you choose to use the livestream: you don’t have to be the person that streams/recorded the livestream video. Using a friend, or an influencer is fine. You can also just talk about your game, have some interesting backstory etc. really anything that is interesting to the potential player. It’s not required to be 100% gameplay all of the time (but showing gameplay is highly recommended).
  • A new prominent feature will be introduced: “Trailer TV” (or whatever it will be officially called), that shows trailers pulled from your store page. So it’s extremely important to have a trailer, as without it you will miss out on a lot of visibility. The trailer that will be shown is the first trailer you have on your store page (the same one that is used as the “micro trailer” when someone hovers over your game in the store).
  • Start your trailer with gameplay, avoid any logos at the start, as this causes players to skip your trailer in “Trailer TV”.
  • Next Fest Press Preview: 10 days before a Steam Next Fest goes live, a list of selected press & Media gets sent an overview of the participating titles. You are normally opted in to the press preview by default. So polish your Steam Page before this date, and make the Demo public 10 days before the event so the press can try it (there is no special option, to give special press access for this occasion). The demo must be public for the press to try it.
  • If you want to drop out of Next Fest: do it before the press preview, as otherwise it may lead to some confusion.
  • The press preview will be almost identical to the live fest page. With one exception: there will be a separate list with games that already have live demos.
  • After you publish your demo you have 2 weeks to send a notification to your wishlists to try the demo. This can boost your demo downloads (which can impact your ranking in the festival), but keep in mind that Steam has a 2-week cooldown on wishlist notifications. So if you plan to release directly after the next fest: don’t fire this notification when the next fest starts, as it can conflict with your launch email notification.
  • Leave your demo up after Next fest is over (at least for some time), as a lot of people are adding your demo to their library, and may choose to play it later.
  • Having a separate demo store page for your demo should not impact festival visibility. Having a dedicated demo page is optional and during the festival it gives no benefit other than reviews (great place to collect feedback).
  • If you have a separate demo store page with reviews: the reviews will not directly impact visibility, but negative reviews may lead to less demo download, and demo downloads impact visibility.
  • For the Next Fest visibility widgets tags and description load from MAIN game page (not separate demo page if you have one). But they may change this? They were not 100% sure about this at times, so make sure both are up to date if you have a separate demo store page.
  • A lot of initial visibility during the festival will be random (as there are over 3000 games in the festival). At later stages the best performing games will be curated and shown more to its target audience (genre based on most played recent games on Steam etc.)
  • There will be a separate section called “Charts”, that will “probably be moved to a separate tab where people can browse by top wishlisted/top played demos”.
  • The first thing people will see on the Next Fest page: games related to the games you recently played (so correct tagging is important).
  • After the first days of “random visibility” games that resonate best will get more prominent visibility (important factors for this: wishlists additions and demo downloads/playtime).
  • Localization: if you don’t have your store page localization people will see it in English. Localization is recommended as it may lead to better click-through to your store page.
  • This festival (October 2024) is going to be the biggest Next Fest yet (3000+ games), so make sure to polish your store page presence, as competition is tough.

This bullet point list was done as part of our preparation process for the upcoming Steam Next Fest. If you find this helpful, you can help us out by taking a look at our game’s Steam Page, and add the game to your wishlist 🙂 

– Mateusz Kupilas


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