Full guide to Steam Next Fest transcript

So, you want to participate in Steam Nexfest, but you don't really know exactly how the platform works or like what do you actually get out of Steam NextFest? How should you join? Should you join? How much does the demo matter? Are there other like things you need to keep in mind like timeline wise? All of those questions and genuinely basically anything you could potentially have to ask will be answered in this video.

This is the full guide to Steam NextFest. Now, before we begin, uh I just want to give a quick intro. Who the [ __ ] am I if you've never seen me before? I've participated in four Steam NextFest so far. Uh, some of them have been absolute miserable with like just a 100 wish lists basically at the end of the week. Some of them have been genuinely like legendary level runs going in with like almost no wish list and ending up with 10,000 wish lists.

I've also done in between there as well. I kind of have been doing Nexfest for I think four years at this point generally since it started back in 2022 23 and it's been something I've been following up not just for our own games but also for our audienc's games. We've had over 800 viewers submitted games that have participated in Steam Nexfest that I've looked at the data for. I've looked at their store pages, what works, what doesn't work.

I've also played like genuinely hundreds of hours on this YouTube channel of me going through viewers' demos for the Steam NextFest and once again seeing what are they doing good, what are they doing bad and all of those things once again are condensed inside of this video. So, part number one, let's just get right into it. What is Steam NextFest? If you kind of aren't really sure on that, uh, Steam NextFest, as Steam calls it, is a celebration of upcoming games.

It kind of is a, um, the little quick history lord dump for it is back during co, there were no physical game events anymore, and that's when Steam introduced kind of online festivals. And Steam NextFest was one of these festivals to show upcoming games on the Steam platform. It showcases all games that want to like participate, of course, with the demo and that are unreleased yet. It gives like a lot of front page visibility and eyeballs to those developers and generally yeah I think it's a a good thing for Steam to participate in.

So yeah, it showcases upcoming games that offer a demo. So if your game is already out or your game doesn't have a demo or like there's an ant operator in there as well, you cannot participate in Steam NextFest. You need to have a demo and the game needs to be unreleased. If both of if if either of those conditions isn't true, you cannot participate. It could be upcoming, but if you do not have a demo, you're not getting any visibility.

They run three times every year, one in February, one in June, and one in October. Usually, it's always in like the second half of the month as well. And you can only participate in Steam Nexfest one time per game. And game here means like app credit basically. So, a game you buy like 100 bucks app credits the store credit. And then you can participate in one Steam NextFest. Let's say you participate in the February Steam NextFest, but it was kind of too early you realize, and you're only going to be releasing in November.

You can no longer participate in the June or October nextfest. You can use it once and once you've participated in the Steam NextFest, you cannot join the Steam NextFest with that same game anymore. How do you register for Steam Nextfest? This is kind of easy. Uh this is part number one. Basically, just simply saying I want to enroll in this. First off, you have a release date set in your Steam Works that is after the next fest you want to participate in.

So, this is a common mistake I see of like people being like, "Hey, I can't seem to register for the Steam NextFest." In Steamworks, they have this like specified release date on what customers see. You need to have a specified release date that is after the Steam NextFest you want to participate in. So, for example, if you want to participate in the October Steam NextFest, if this date currently is stating end of September, you will not see the option to enroll in the Steam NextFest.

Similarly, if this is like unassigned, if you have never set up a like intended release date, you will also not be able to submit or like register for the Steam Next. So, you can just put any date out there. Basically, it doesn't need to be public yet, but you just need to give a date to Steam Works of, hey, this is when I'm planning to release my game. Once you've done that, you simply refresh your page and then under marketing and tools, you can see here this uh Steam NextFest October 2026 thing.

You can click in on it and it will show you like a quick panel of like, okay, do you want to enroll? There's like a little radio button. You click that and congratulations, you are now registered. you need to register a little bit less than two months in advance is kind of the deadline for registering. That doesn't mean that you cannot participate anymore after that deadline has passed, but then your Steam page needs to be public and you need to send a like appeal to Steamworks.

So, it's kind of like the cost of registering is so low. So, just register whenever you have your app credits, even if you're still very far out and you don't even know yet, am I going to really participate in the Steam NextFest? Yes or no. Um, there's a difference though between registering and participating. Registering you can do basically very easy. Participating I mean with this like you're actually taking place in the Steam NextFest.

This one does require you to have a public store page and a public demo the day that Steam Nextfest starts. Maybe an important thing here, the registering you can register without your Steam store page being live, being approved or anything like that. You can have a completely brand new fresh Steam app credit. You just set the date and you can register in Steam NextFest in like five minutes basically after you've bought your app credit.

So that's the one thing you can register very easily participating. That's a little bit of a different story where you need to be registered and have the demo and have the store page live and then you will automatically then participate. If you are like okay I registered but turns out that my demo isn't really ready. You can always drop out. There is no penalty for dropping out. It's not like oh you are losing your Steam credit.

As long as the Steam NextFest hasn't started, you can at any point in time unregister and there's no real problem. So that's kind of why I say always register even if unsure. So you can see here, for example, for the October Nextfest 2026, we currently have five registered games. I think realistically two of those are going to participate, but it's better to just have all of them registered so that you do not forget like last minute of like, oh, I didn't enroll in the Steam NextFest for this game and now it's kind of in this awkward period.

We've had games that have been unable to participate in the Steam Nexfest because I forgot to register myself. So now I'm always like just keep registering and and we'll figure it out in the future. So number two, the timeline. Steam Nexus has timelines. Uh I'm going to use the October one for an example here because that's just the next one. But these kind of timelines, you can find these on the Steamworks dashboards or like on the Steamworks help pages.

Uh they kind of stay always the same. So August 18th, there is a live virtual Q&A session. I'm going to be honest, you do not need to watch that if you've seen this one. It's just the Steam team once again going through like some of the things of like, oh, you need to have your demo submitted enough in advance so that they can check it cuz if you don't have the demo, you can't participate. It's pretty like basic stuff in there.

You're going to find more in this video. So, you don't need to join this. Also, there are recordings of the previous information sessions. They get uploaded to YouTube as well. So, you can take a look there if you want to see like what it's actually like. Then August 31st uh is the registration deadline which is in Pacific Daylight Time which is like the time Valve works on. It's like Seattle time zone basically. And this is when you need to have clicked that register interest button.

Uh after that and this is where kind of like there's a little bit of a difference between what you might be doing and what a other studio might be doing is that they do also suggest that you already have for example your store page live. you have a demo or something already live or a trailer because after the official registration deadline, Valve is going to start and look at like a few of the most interesting games like the top games that they can use as marketing material because they always make like a little trailer that they upload to their YouTube channel as well and they're looking for games that they can include in that like little trailer.

Um, to be honest, I wouldn't worry about this too much. I think this video is designed from the perspective of you're watching Bite Me. you're like a small indie studio and you need to figure out what is next in the first place. The we'll see this as well with um press in a second with like press preview. When we first participated in the Steam next test, we were like very very stressed about like oh we need to participate in the press preview.

We need to like crunch to get our demos up earlier and all of that and it didn't really matter because there's only about 10 to 12 games that they choose and these are usually the games that you know they're already going in with 50,000 wish lists. are not going to be the like small indie games for the most part that have like a thousand wish list at most uh going into the Steam next. Uh but yeah, if you should get included because your store page is live already, then you can get included.

They'll send you an email and it goes from there. Uh and then yeah, September 21st if you'd like your demo to be uh live at the start of the press preview. This is when you should have submitted. So this is kind of just like a safeguard because it usually takes between like one and two weeks assuming something could go wrong still for your demo once it's submitted to actually be approved because it might go through Q&A, there might be an issue and then you need to do another round of submissions.

So these are the dates that actually matter. The actual Steam Next starts on the 19th of October and a little bit less than two weeks in advance there's a press preview but this would require you to have your Steam page live and then potentially have a demo. So the demo is actually not needed for the press preview. So your the press preview is kind of like a a more hidden site. Um you can still find it through Google though the press preview of like previous events where you can early on see all of the games participating in the Steam NextFest already.

You can also use this to check if your own game is actually going to participate in Steam NextFest or if something is wrong. Demo is optional honestly, but you know it's it's suggested to do here as well. We'll talk about timelines more in a second. So don't worry too much about the press preview. I I think is honestly what I would say here, but it is a thing to keep in mind as well. I also have never really seen any like news articles from press like them themselves going on to the press preview to find cool games.

Usually like the press preview you as the developer need to send emails to press regardless and they don't really come to you. So yeah, Steam next begins every year. It's at 10:00 a.m. PDT on a Monday, so Pacific Daylight Time once again. And it lasts 7 days, 168 hours. And then there's a little wrap-up. If your game is in the top 50 demos, you will get more visibility basically because Steam makes a second page of like, hey, these were the top 50 demos of this year's Steam NextFest.

This is the kind of timeline approval wise that is best practice where you would announce your Steam store page around 6 months before the Steam NextFest starts. You can do more as well, but I think like generally best practice is at least 6 months and then 3 months before your uh next fest starts, you would already have a first version of the demo out. to do marketing beats with all of those things and kind of get the first demo feedback.

Make sure that the onboarding is better. Get a lot of feedback and then make a second big Steam NextFest update for your demo. Generally, you release this like a few days before the actual Steam NextFest, right before the Steam NextFest. And then you release the game a few months after Steam NextFest, one to three months after Steam NextFest, not longer. We're going to talk about it later as well because then if you're releasing like half a year after Steam Nextfest, you're better off going for a next fest later. basically like joining the February one instead of the October one.

There's also another side of like the uh the timeline. This is the bare minimums. This is what we've also done for some of our games. And you know like if you're doing approaches like for example small games, getting a store page out 6 months in advance may not be the most realistic for most developers. You're kind of like more flying at the seat of your pants or something like that. Uh the bare minimum basically is you need to have submitted your Steam page and demo build two to three weeks before the next fest starts for review.

So this way at least like last minute the day before the next starts you can still put both live. Now you will lose out on multiple marketing beats. This is genuinely not suggested but I'm just putting it in here of like this is the bare minimum. You can do this if you are like hey I have this two month scoped project or like three month scoped like you're looking at this video when it releases like in the middle of August.

You can still kind of basically speedrun the October next fest. And that's like kind of the whole thing of like the make small games approach allows you to do this, but know that you will lose out on multiple marketing beats. You may lose out on, for example, your Steam page and you'll still have your Steam page announcement beat for the most part, but like the dedicated demo launch would maybe be combined with that Steam page announcement and all of those things.

This is not what I suggest. It is what we have done. I need to say that as well. And it we and it did play out pretty well for us. But I still wanted to include this. Uh this is the better approach. I think this is unfortunately for a lot of developers the more realistic approach to kind of give you an idea of uh timelines. So yeah, this is what you could see with us like we launched our Steam page on the 18th of February and then the Steam Nexus started the 24th or 25th of February and it just like spiked up immediately.

This is I would say an anomaly. Uh do not go in expecting these numbers, but we kind of like it it worked out for us. There's other place where you see this where this happens and this line does not go up. It just stays flat and you lost out on your Steam NextFest. you lost out on your marketing beats and your game is kind of [ __ ] And the question is, do you want to risk that with a large scope game? Most likely not.

If you're spending like 2 months on a game, you can like take more risks basically. So, how does Steam Nexus work? This is something that seems to have some level of confusion is also where like the whole AI slop argument comes in. Uh that I think you should not worry too much about. Steam Nexus is split up into two dedicated periods. The first two days, first 48 hours is this phase, the kind of like random phase. And then after the second day has ended, basically from the start of day three, Steam takes like a very big lever in their office and they they crank it down and suddenly then the algorithm changes and Steam NextFest will start giving personalized suggestions.

So this is also why you see that argument of the first two days of Steam NextFest because it is genuinely random and every game no matter how good or bad it is gets a baseline amount of impressions and like views basically will be shown. So you'll see like a lot of like horrible capsules, AI games, asset pack flips and all of those things the first two days of Steam Nexfest and then Steam will go and they will take like all of that data of like how do people engage with this and then after the second day has ended they will start actually giving personalized suggestions.

So, where do people find out about your game if you're participating in the Steam Nexus? There's a few places. First off, Trailer TV. I think this is a pretty important one because it is placed right at the top when you click on the Steam Nexus page. Trailer TV is kind of like an autoscrolling like widget basically on the Steam page where every 10 seconds a new trailer is shown to you. Like you can even see it of like next game is in 8 seconds.

So, you get 10 seconds of a trailer and then it goes into the next game and you can then quickly see like, oh, this looks interesting. I want to like install the demo. I want to follow this or you know just give me the next trailer. If you scroll down a little bit more, you get to the kind of like browse all category. And this is where things like capsule matter a lot because you can see immediately like Inferno Protocol is kind of a a weird capsule.

I would say maybe people don't like that. Whereas like Tidal Rush, maybe people like that capsule a lot more. Once again, the first two days you will see some absolutely criminal steam capsules in here or like the most miserable MS Pain style or like AI generated art where like where you have the AI bros look at you with with a straight face and be like, "Oh, I think this looks really good." And it's just it's just garbage.

Um, and this is where you could like go, you can scroll and you're like, "Hey, this actually looks like an interesting game. Let me once again install the demo or let's click through and wish list this." And then also uh you have genre based suggestions where you can be like hey give me all the steam nexus games in the hacken slash genre for example here once again capsule matters but also steam tagging matters. Having enough tags here you usually want to go for the maximum of 20 tags for your steam page will allow you to show up in multiple spaces as well.

There's actually a way also that you can see once the event is live where your game is listed. Um, this is kind of like a hidden thing on Steam Works and it's not available right now. So, I can't give you a direct link, but once the Steam Nexus is live, you can see where within an event you're being shown. So, for example, you can see that you're shown up in the casual, strategy, management, and like citybuilding tabs.

If you filter by genre, the more tabs you're in, basically, the more impressions you have. There is something very wrong if you only show up in like one or two categories here. You should always have more than just like one or two entries. the games that perform the worst on nextfest are the ones that just do not show up in the like next fest page in general. Okay, let's do a little bit of like um I guess midbusting and mid approving next.

Um the Steam algorithm is very important. You basically want to be favored after those 48 hours. But what actually matters after those first 48 hours? There's two main things that the Steam algorithm looks at. This is also stuff that Steam talks about in those like talks that they upload like the 1 hour Q&A. So that's kind of like the source. It's a mix of that plus trust me bro and and just experience. Uh first thing that matters is a wish list gained during the Steam NextFest.

So once the Steam NextFest starts basically and we call that velocity like how many wishes you get in a certain short period. Long time ago I think two years ago a little bit more than that. It actually was more of the games that got wish lists the two weeks before the Steam Nexist and also just how many wishes they had at the start of Steam Nexist. That isn't the case anymore. Talk about it in a second. So that's number one. how many wishes you gained in those first 48 hours.

And then second off, your conversion rates. Okay, they will give you impressions. That's kind of what I mean here with views. Like you have impressions to to visits and then visits to wish lists or demo plays. And then also people like you know if they play the demo, how many of them wish list? They look at the data for that and they make a profile for you basically of like you are person A and then there's other people on Steam that they match of like oh this person B they kind of play like person A and person A really like these games so we're going to suggest those games to person B as well and that's kind of the thing of like these are the the stats that really matter.

What doesn't matter is the wish list amount going into the Steam Next. And this is kind of a weird one. There's a little asterisk here where the algorithm doesn't care about wish lists going into the thing, but you will see that like a lot of statistics still show that the more wishes you have going into the Steam NextFest, the more wish list you're going to get out of it. That's not really because of the algorithm, but more because of validation.

You know, a game that has 20,000 wish lists at the start of Steam NextFest already has kind of like a virality around it already. There's like an audience who really loves that game and it's probably also going to be a pretty good polished game with a good fantasy and a good appeal and all of that. It's kind of like, you know, the winners win approach of if you go into the Steam NextFest, you're already validated, you already have a lot of wish lists.

Well, probably you're going to get more wish list as well. Whereas, if you go in with 200 wish lists, well, maybe that's just because your game is bad. And if your game is bad, then nobody's going to do those conversions. They're not going to wish list. They're not going to visit and and all of those things. Second thing, playtime length does not matter. They look at just like, do people play the demo? They do not look specifically at like, oh, they played the demo for only 10 minutes or only 30 minutes or like these guys played the demo for 3 hours.

They do not punish short games. Whether your demo is 3 hours, your demo is 15 minutes, both are completely fine for the Steam NextFest and the algorithm doesn't really care about that. And the last thing that used to matter more is live stream coverage where Steam actually allows you to live stream and there were services like Robo Streamer where you would just like upload like gameplay footage of your game and you would get extra visibility.

That has been gone since I think October 2024. So almost 2 years at this point. Don't really need to bother with live stream coverage anymore. It does not give you any visibility boost, any algorithmic boost or all of that. So, okay. I I want to then give you a little bit of an idea of like what are some good numbers, what are some bad numbers, what can you expect going into the Steam NextFest. And this is from the how tomarket.com blog because, you know, that's they have even more data than I do.

Uh if you get over 10,000 wish lists from the Steam NextFest, you're you're doing really really solid. You're in like the top 2% or something of like all games participating in Steam Nextfest. I think even like top 1% basically. Gold tier 7,000 to 10,000 wish list. silver tier, which is like I guess more common 1,000 to 7,000 wish lists and bronze tier kind of like if you're a bad game, you're going to get between zero and a,000 wish lists.

I think you know genuinely if you're getting you're going to get like 250 wish lists most likely from the Steam next even if your game is pretty bad. Like we had some some pretty mediocre games like a desktop idler pet. It's a virtual enemy girl. That one got like 700 wish lists which is pretty, you know, for for what that game was was pretty okay I would say. Uh but it's not that great in the the grand scheme of things.

So that's kind of the the first thing. Don't really expect I think a good like if you feel like you're confident about your game but it's not like an amazing game, you don't go with like 30,000 wish lists or something. I think 2,000 wish list is kind of also a number that I see like on average around the 2,000 range for a Steam Nexus if you have a moderately competent game. Uh these are once again also from how to market the game.

This is that that thing that I was talking about like if you go in with more wish lists you do genuinely get more wish lists out but that is also because you have more more marketing. you know, a game that has over a 100,000 wish lists, you know, IGN can upload trailers. Uh, they will get press articles written about the fact that they are participating in Steam NextFest and they kind of have like more traffic going to them regardless from the Steam NextFest, yes or no.

Steam is not giving you more wish lists basically by themselves, but you're probably having a better game, so you get more. Uh, yeah. So, out of the the submitted games, you can also see here the the minimum a single game got was 41 wish list from the Steam Nexus. That's still a a bad performance, don't get me wrong. But, you know, if you go in with 200 wish lists, suddenly getting 40 may seem interesting and like maybe be like, "Oh, this is perfect." But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, 40 wish list is is just a bad result basically.

Uh, so yeah, I think generally, yeah, as you can see here with the 1 to 9K, you're just hitting at about the 1K, 1.7K, 2K, 5K, you know, in that range. It depends a lot on more things like what game are you making, what's the genre, what's the hook, all of those things. And it's not just only the wish list going in. Uh these are also some some stats that I have from our own audience. So the sample size is relatively similar, but this is actually our data pool from people like you who watch me in my white t-shirt talk about game development.

I always do like these little surveys at the start of every Steam NextFest. For the February Nextfest, we got 172 submissions. Uh 350 wish list was the median. 6,000 wish lists were the average. I would kind of ignore the average because there were some like 50,000 plus wish list games in there. Medium wish lists 350 before the next fest. That's not really that good. And then you know what they expect? That's another very fun question to ask developers of like, hey, how many wish lists do you expect to gain from the Steam NextFest.

On average, people expect 3,000. That's not what they actually get, just what they expect. Uh or they median expect 633. Um, if you're going with 350 wish lists, do not expect to like triple your wish list in total, like getting another 633 wish lists. I think that is unfortunately not going to happen most of the uh time. Uh, something else that I think is a very interesting thing that I want to talk about is that Steam Nexfest, whilst it's all around centered about like upcoming games and demos, the demos almost don't really matter that much.

And this is something I want to caveat this. I do not suggest this. I think you should try to make better games, but there is kind of a a use case almost you could say of participating in Steam NextFest, even if you have a dog [ __ ] demo if you're going to release the game quickly right after Steam NextFest. Anyway, not from the wish list from the demo, but just from the wish list from the extra visibility. You see that here as well, around 70% on average of all wish lists you get from Steam NextFest will come from so-called window shoppers. people who are just browsing the Steam NextFest page and are like, "Hey, this game looks interesting.

Let me add this to wish list." But who do not have the time to go and play 50 different demos over like an entire week. So, you can see that here Steam gives you these graphs as well of how many players there are, uh, how many people you wishlisted, and how many people actually played and wish listed. So, out of the 10,000 wish lists we got for MO9, only 2,500 actually played the demo and 7,500 just saw the game during the Steam Next are like, "This looks pretty interesting.

Let me wishlist it." and then moved on to the next game. Similarly to my virtual friend, that was that desktop pet game that I was talking about. Only 99 players actually played the demo. And then we basically had another 900 wish lists. I think this is almost more like 88% who just saw the game and was like, "This looks cute. I'm going to wishlist it and uh moved on then." So now you're like, "Okay, 2,000 wishes from NextFest sounds awesome.

How do I join the Steam NextFest and how do we get your game ready to make the most out of Steam NextFest?" First thing is we stop. Your demo is not a place. This is something I want to keep screaming at you. Okay, we understand this. Okay, question mark. Then do not start your Steam Nexus demo with something like this. This was from a viewer submitted game early alpha disclaimer and it's like created for testing and gathering feedback and that this is wrong.

Your demo is not your play test, especially join this team next fest. Your next fest is your last stop before releasing a game. This is generally like you know your game is one or two months out from release. All of the major bugs are fixed like a lot of the gameplay loop the gameplay loop is solved already as in like you as a developer have figured out this is fun. This is what people like. This is not a play test. Again even though 75% of people are kind of just wishlisting and window shopping.

That doesn't mean that your demo needs to be bad. You're getting a lot of extra eyeballs. Do not waste them with a bad demo. you see these things of like I see viewer submitted demos without things like main menus without settings and all of those things and for a play test that's fine but for a Steam Nexfest build that doesn't work don't do that um play testing and demo feedback should ideally have started months ago that's also why in that like best case scenario timeline you get the demo out 3 months before the Steam Nexus and then sure you can put in like the little disclaimer of like yeah there might be like some bugs here and there whatever but do not put a disclaimer of like hey this game is going to be buggy at the start of your Steam Nexfest demo because what are you telling your players basically?

Oh, this game isn't really that good, but hey, thanks for playing it anyway. And I think also there's um this kind of troubling trend where some people are using NextFest as more of a play test and it just disrespects not just your audience, but I think also the entire gamedev ecosystem of what NextFest is supposed to be like. You know, there's like these days of like, "Oh, Steam Nexus is now just a game jam where you're kind of just making a shitty game and putting it up on the Nexist and using that as your validation because you're getting a lot of eyeballs." Don't do that.

I think that's a dick move. I think that's a bad developer move and I think you just shouldn't do that because you are ruining the quality of Steam Next and the future of Steam Nexfest potentially for the next few years because you're kind of muddying the waters of what Steam NextFest is supposed to be like. Steam Nexus at the end of the day is an event for players that we as the developers can get a lot of benefits for.

But Steam is not doing it for developers specifically. They're doing it because a lot of more players are buying games which makes them money. And by just putting up halfbaked demos and halfbaked trailers, players will not like Steam NextFest as much anymore. And if the sentiment for Steam NextFest is more negative, then Steam is going to have to change it. They're going to, I don't know, probably not cancel it, but maybe they're going to do like more strictness with it.

They're going to change how it's working right now. and it may not be in a positive direction. And then we get to kind of the the sad thing of what if your game is not ready? What if you're want to participate in Steam Steam Nexus, but it's just honestly too early. So once again, we had 172 viewer submitted games and half of those had under 300 wish lists the moment Steam Nexfest started. I put a little graph here. Uh 23% of games had under 100%.

And these are like cumulative so it's not like don't don't add these up because I know it doesn't add up to 100 but like twothirds of all games participating in Steam nextfest had under 1,000 wish lists, 50% under 300 and 25% of under 100 wish lists. Going back earlier you know the amount of wish list you have before the Steam Nexus starts is an indicator of okay is an indicator of okay this game is probably you know there's an audience for it.

People are going to like it. People know what this festival is. People know what this game is and they are interested in it. And if you're joining this team next with 100 wish lists, the game most likely is not ready. There's kind of two options. The first option, and nobody wants to hear this, is my game is bad and nobody really wants it. If you join the Steam NextFest with 100 wish lists, next fest is not going to save the game.

But I also don't know if you really should stop like fall out of the next fest because the game is just inherently so bad and so [ __ ] that you cannot save it in the first place. This you this is what you often see with like bad genre choices like for example a 4x3 locked aspect ratio like aspect ratio like shoot them up or something with like very crappy like geni art or like a very bad uh capsule very bad visuals in general and it's like okay you could fall out of this team next but there is like the core of this game is unfortunately so rotten and just such a bad gameplay idea that most likely you cannot salvage this anyway.

That's option number one. Option number two, which is unfortunately less common even though everybody wants to believe they are in the the second camp is okay the game is good but you just haven't put any effort into marketing it. You know if you get this game in front of enough people you kind of are like confident that hey this game is actually going to pop off. It's kind of what happened for us with M98 where we were just on such a tight development timeline that we were confident that the game was very polished and if people played it they would enjoy it but we just hadn't had the time to market it properly before.

In that case, if it's like steam next is starting, you have 200 wish list, but you are confident about your game, most likely you just want to pull out because next fest should be again the last stop. Next fest, after next fest, there's not that much marketing anymore. You need to do all the marketing steps. You need to reach out to content creators. You need to reach out to press. You need to join other festivals as well to build up your wish list as well.

And by joining the Steam NextFest too early, I see developers do this time and time again where they join the Steam NextFest. I can a year in advance before their game comes out. You will regret it later on. You will regret that. Oh, actually looking back, NextFest was such a great opportunity, but my demo wasn't ready, my game wasn't ready, and I could have done so much more if I had just spent more time on marketing the game and on getting the game out there earlier and getting feedback that way and then join the next fest later.

And hey, this is the part where I'm going to uh shill myself. If you want to get a third party perspective from someone, like I said, who has played hundreds of Steam Nexfest demos at this point, I can work together with you. Uh you pay me €129. You get a 20 to 30 minute video of me playing your game, giving you feedback, narrating like my feedback all along the way, giving you like a little like list of like, hey, these are all the things I would work on.

And then we hop on a call afterwards and we talk about where do we go next? Okay, what are the problems? How do we solve these problems? Okay, the game is good. How do we market this? I give you all of my marketing experience and like the the context I have for like press content creators, all of those things. Or maybe we need to take a step back and it's like, okay, this game actually, whilst it's interesting, like we need to change some core level of the game design, for example, if we really want to find an audience with it.

If you want to find out more information, there's a link down below. Like I said, it's €129. I think it's a pretty fair price for everything that you get. Uh you can go over to bmg.yt/shipit or again, the link is going to be in the description as well where you can read more information about this whole thing. I've done like over 15 almost 20 of these calls at this point and people always like it and they have a lot of actionable feedback at the end of the day.

So I think it's very much worth it if you want to make the most out of Steam next because I think this can genuinely be the difference between getting 100 wish list and a thousand wish lists from the Steam Nexus or even more. So okay, you want to make a good demo and you don't have €129 to spend on me. I also have a bunch of free resources that I've made on how you make a good demo. Uh I think the three core things that you need to focus on for Steam Nexfest is one having quick onboarding.

Don't start your game with long cut scenes. Don't have like studio logos and a longass tutorial. Have a clear ending. That's another important one. Don't just let the demo go on forever until the player gets bored with it. Decide early on, okay, after like 25 minutes of gameplay, something like that, for example. I'm going to make this thing happen in game and there's going to be a little pop-up that says, "Thank you for playing the demo.

Go and wish list it now." And it's like a picture of your cat to guilt trip people into wish listing more and it should be bug free. There's much more as you can see on this list on the site here. Uh you can access this whole list for free as well by going to bmg.ytdemo linked down below as well. And that brings us to another question like okay we're going to have a demo. And this is a question I get often of like should you have a dedicated demo page?

Yes or no? Honestly both options perfectly valid. If you have no demo page you're going to perform well. If you have a demo page you're going to perform just as good or just as bad. Algorithmically also there is no real difference between like how the algorithm doesn't treat you better. if you have like good review scores or all of that. It's more of like secondary effects of like yeah, if you have a dedicated Steam demo page, you can get the reviews and if that is going to be like overwhelmingly negative, okay, people might not want to play your demo as much.

But results wise, genuinely there is not much difference. I think it's like a 1% increase in wish lists for studios that have a dedicated demo page, but that's also because they generally are more confident about their game. They can have to put the reviews out there and the game is usually a little bit better. It opens you up to reviews, like I said, which requires more confidence. But if you have bad reviews, you can also just go back to not having a dedicated demo page.

There's no real downside for it either. If you feel like, oh, I think my demo is not that great. You're going to get like mixed ratings. Then step number one is maybe we should look at how do we make this demo better. And then step number two is okay, if there actually is something wrong, we just convert it back to a normal page and all of the reviews disappear. Another important thing when you're getting ready for Steam next is okay, we've been talking so much about the demo because the demo is very important, but again, people are window shopping.

So, don't forget the Steam page itself. Localization, English is only one/ird of all of Steam. So, localizing to other languages like Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, all of those languages will help a lot in appearing in front of more people. You do not need to per se localize the demo, although that is also highly suggested, but you have to localize the Steam pages. You also need amazing capture art. You need something that once again you see that big list of brows and you need to be the scroll stopper.

You need to be the game that people look at and they're like, "Oh [ __ ] this capsule looks really, really good. I want to click on it." Just good honestly doesn't cut it. You need amazing level capsule art. And sometimes that costs money and I'll be the first person to start hating on the big capsule mafia and how prices have gone utterly insane with like thousand plus dollars for a Steam capsule. You can do good things yourself as well. you just need to sit down and like think a little bit more about it.

We we have like some streams where we've done uh as well or like you can hop over in our discord if you want to get feedback on your Steam capsule art because I think most of the capsules we've made like for example M98 one we've done just ourselves in like an afternoon you can do a lot of good stuff just by spending a little bit of time yourself already and and [ __ ] around in Photoshop for lack of a better word but really going into the idea of finding like the core visuals of your game and using that for very nice capture art or just paying a,000 bucks or 500 bucks to someone to make you good capt website as well.

Another thing, make a new trailer. That's also it's a marketing beat. Your Steam NextFest has a demo trailer. It's also used for trailer TV. So, you want to put in the action up front. You want to make sure that this is something that people who only have 10 seconds to look at your trailer can very quickly understand, oh, this is the game. It looks really cool. Let's go and take a look at that varied screenshot and gifs and and all of those things.

Once again, there's a full list that you can access here. Um, this is just a part of it by going to bmg.yt/teamage. Once again, linked down below. Creator outreach is another one that you need to do. So, you have the demo kind of ready. And Nexfest is, like I said, a marketing beat, not just for the visibility you get from NextFest itself, but you're also wanting to kind of have it as an excuse to contact content creators and present all of that to once again cover your demo, play your demo, get more wish lists that way instead of only relying on Steam themselves.

This is kind of a a template um timeline I would say where you the top uh line here is kind of like how many months into development you are. Uh so one marketing beat is for example your announcement. Uh your playlist could be another marketing beat. Your demo initial announcement can be a marketing beat where you reach out to content creators and the next fest you do a big demo update and once again you reach out to content creators.

Those are kind of like the main marketing beats. So once again, when you reached out for the demo, which you should have done if you haven't done that yet, reach out to content creators, be like, "Hey, there's a demo out now. It would be a lot if you can play it." Doing a similar thing for Steam Nextfest is also something I suggest. What you can do here is you can have a dedicated branch that for example has the major NextFest demo update already available on it.

And then sending the creators uh release state override keys is what it's called. So they have a better version of the demo than what the normal people have who would just go to your Steam page. and you send them this three weeks plus in advance of when the Steam Nexus starts. Content creators, they're kind of miserably swamped the moment that Steam Nexus kind of starts, like one or two weeks in advance, they get like genuinely 10 to 50 to sometimes even 100 emails in a single day of people saying like, "Hey, I'm participating in Steam Nexfest.

Don't you want to play my demo?" By sending the emails 3 weeks in advance with the like cool snazzy game build, you give them time to record it before the Steam Nexus actually started and then they can just schedule it for when Steam Nexus starts and they don't need to like scramble the moment Steam Nexus starts itself. Then we get to what to do during the Steam Nexus. And this is honestly uh a pretty short chapter and I think that's kind of an important one.

We spend a lot of time getting our game ready for a Steam NextFest, but once it's Steam NextFest itself kind of it gets very chill. Step number one, don't panic. Be available for the first few hours should something for some cosmic reason still go wrong. For example, your build doesn't run on like Mac OS or or something like that. Be available for that. But at that point, your demo should have been out for multiple months or multiple weeks at least.

And it should have been tested quite a bit already. You're confident in the fact that, hey, this is going to run and people are not going to like think that this is just malware that they install on their PC. And then resist the urge to push updates. This is kind of a deliberate like how little there is on the slides here because I think you genuinely shouldn't do too much during the Steam Nextfest itself. I see developers do this where they're pushing daily updates for the Steam NextFest as well based on like player feedback.

I think you're kind of chasing fires needlessly. You should be confident in your demo and then just like sit back on your rocking chair and just like watch all the feedback come in. Watch all the data come in, but don't immediately act upon it. Wait until the next over. wait until you have more of a high level view of like these were all the main sentiments. Of course, if there is something like miserable quality of life that you can very easily fix, you can still do that, but do not touch any of your core systems.

Do not touch anything that remotely touches your save file system and all of that because it's way too easy to break something. And the impact of breaking your demo during Steam Nextfest is enormous compared to the potential upside you can get. There's a lot of demos on the Steam Nexfest that have whack balancing that are not really optimal, but at least they didn't change things during the Steam Nexus itself and you just write it out and then afterwards you get back to work.

Another thing you should do is just chill and play some other games as demos. That's the best way honestly to learn what you should and shouldn't do. Look at what the T demos are doing. What do they do good? Maybe it's the genre they chose. Maybe it's the onboarding they do. Maybe they have a really good call to action or like a store page that's optimized for Steam Nextfest. What demos do you also see that you know I hate how they implement the onboarding there's doing stuff wrong and and all of those things you for example see like somebody a game that the moment you close the game it automatically opens like a web browser logged into Steam or something like that and you're like I don't want that don't like hijack my PC you will learn more from playing other people's demos than you will from like watching these kinds of videos of like oh how should I make the optimal Steam Nexus build or whatever just play more demos as well use that as kind of downtime for your own game because you've been pushing on this so much to get it ready for the Steam Nextfist.

Now go and play what some other people are doing with the Steam Nextfist and either you're going to feel very confident of like, oh, actually I have a really good demo or you're going to feel inspired like, oh [ __ ] I could have done so much more better for my next demo that I'm going to like learn from and write down and all of that. And then Next Fest is over and we get to the big question, what after Steam Nextfest?

First off, you probably want to check some of your stats. First off, if your game has low impressions, it might be a tagging issue. It might be an algorithm issue. This is low impressions in general. So, this means like nobody saw your game in the first place even in those first 48 hours because like I said, you don't show up in like enough of the like tagging uh specific hubs and all of that, your trailer TV and all of that.

Second off, okay, we have a decent amount of impressions, but very low visits or very low wish lists. This mainly means that there is something wrong with the store page. Maybe your capsule wasn't intriguing. Maybe the hook, like the short description, didn't really explain why people would want to get the game. The screenshots were bad. All of those things. If you have high demo downloads but low wish lists, there's most likely something wrong with your demo itself.

Like, look at the play time stats. A general benchmark, you can see this in the Steam dashboard as well, is that you want over 80% of all players to play for more than 10 minutes. If you reach that, okay, you have a pretty okay demo. Of course, higher is even better. Like 85% over 90% means you have a really good demo. If it's under 80%, there's something wrong with your demo. Simple as that. You need to start over from scratch.

Look at people playing the demo. Where are you losing them in the onboarding? Is there something that is just annoying them too much? Like text pop-ups, tutorial pop-ups, all of those things. Or is there like some [ __ ] up balance thing where people are immediately losing? You need to figure this out. Once again, if these things go wrong, try not to like hot fix too much on the Steam Nexfest itself, but just look at all of the data after Steam Nexfest is over itself.

And then don't launch immediately because that's kind of the thing of like okay next is the final stop before we release but that doesn't mean right after Nexfest you should release. I think it's actually one of the dumbest things you can do is releasing right after Nexus because you are joining the line with like genuinely like on the the days after Steam Nexus there's up to a 100 games releasing in a single day and it's extremely crowded.

They're all fighting for new and trending. They're all fighting for popular upcoming and you're simply not going to fit into there for the most part. There's also the the kind of concept that I see our players have as well of like oh but if I just got like so many wishes from the Steam Nexus I have kind of like momentum and if I release right after I'm going to get a better conversion on launch. I think Game Discover Co and uh such have done some research into it and these are generally all debunked whether you release the week after or the month after or two months after kind of the conversion rates stay the the same for the most part and also there's other stuff like the June nextfest is one week before the Steam summer sale starts.

I think even less like 5 days or something. It's just it's just miserable. Do not launch during a summer sale. Do not launch in the 5 days before the summer sale. You're going to have to wait it out basically until after the summer sale because otherwise you're losing out on so much visibility. There's too much competition. All of those things. And then what should you do with the demo? This is another question. I would generally leave the demo up especially right after Nexfest.

Leave the demo up. And it also allows you to keep joining like other festivals. Get more visibility for them if you join like for example I don't know tiny teams or other steam fests or third party festivals. They generally give more visibility to games that have demos as well. So you get more out of that. People like to play demos. Also maybe people may have wish listed the game but they didn't play the demo during the Steam Nexus and they want to revisit it later on after like kind of things have calmed down again.

Sometimes there could be a case made of once the game is about to come out taking down the demo. This depends on the game genre, how much play time the demo has versus the full game and and all of those things. It's there's no real one-sizefits-all approach. There's pros and cons to both. The the quick rundown is generally if you have the demo up whilst the game is out, you're going to get like higher review scores because people who wouldn't have liked the game would have played the demo first and then they would have realized, oh, this game is not for me, and they wouldn't have bought it and left a negative review in the first place.

On the other hand, there's a statement of like if you take the demo down, you're going to earn more money because people will just buy the game instead of maybe like trying out the demo but not being completely convinced that they want to actually spend money on the game because there's more friction in doing a refund than just playing the demo and not being interested in the game. There's both approaches, like I said, no perfect one.

And then you just go and you look at, okay, let's release. How do we plan our release from here? So, one to three months after Steam Nextfest is kind of what you want to do release-wise. I say here depending on game success, if your game kind of had like a mediocre like next fest, just release it like relatively soon afterwards and move on to the next game. If you have a game that performs really really well from the next fest, there is a case to be made of like, okay, let's spend another one, two months extra than we had originally planned on this to kind of build up more wish list, even build up more marketing, do a little bit more gameplay features and and things we get from community feedback, maybe some scope creep ideas to make this game the best possible game on release.

But don't wait longer than like three or four months. Don't be like, "Okay, let's actually delay until after the next NextFest, for example, because you're not joining it anymore anyway." Doesn't really make much sense. Also, what I would do now with the the way personal calendar works and all that is that right after Steam Nextfest, you will actually do another marketing beat, which is the release date announcement, and then you say like, "Oh, this game is going to come out December, I don't know, 15th or something like you give an a concrete day, you'll start showing up in personal calendar." You can also use this as an extra marketing beat to make a release date announcement trailer.

Once again, try to get some more whistles from that. And it gives you some time as well to actually take a look at all the feedback from Steam NextFest. What's some quality of life? What's some onboarding issues? What's some bugs and things like that? Whilst a demo, especially the NextFest demo, is not supposed to be a play test. It will still give you feedback. That's kind of just because so much more people will come to your game, things will break.

Maybe Turkish people can't play your game with their keyboard for some reason. Maybe ultra wide users have kind of a weird edge case that you didn't think about before and you want to go through that feedback and you want to solve those and you want to start planning your full games release content creator coverage because once again same thing here let's say we're releasing December 15th probably by December 1st latest we want to have sent out or like release ready builds already to content creators to once again create content for maybe you do an embargo maybe not it's out of the scope of this video but you want to start planning the full like game marketing as well you take a look at okay who covered the steam next demo.

They will most likely also want to cover the full game if you give them early access to it. Put them on the content creator list. There's other videos on this channel and all of that that you can look at to learn more about that. So, this video is getting long. Let's take a quick recap and uh where should we go next? Um I think as a quick summary, NextFest is one of your core marketing beats. You cannot control content creators.

You cannot control press covering you, but you can control NextFest. Next is one of those festivals is kind of guaranteed right now. That's also why I say I do not like people who are mistreating NextFest because there might be a future one day where we cannot guarantee the fact that any game can join NextFest anymore. We had games where NextFest was really well but for some reason content creators never wanted to pick up the game.

Press didn't want to pick up the game and we cannot control that. You cannot force press or content creators to play your game. You can send out as as many emails as you want. You can just get unlucky and nobody will cover it. Even though you know they're very strong, it happens, but you can always control participating in Steam next and you can make the best possible demo for next as well because that is completely in your control.

The upside can be huge for the amount of effort required. I think for the most games that they get made, a demo should be done for marketing purposes anyway. And if you have a demo, the extra step of going from the demo to a nexus demo is honestly not that much. It's a little bit of extra prep work, but the upside and the extra visibility is 100% worth it. And also, Nexfest just multiplies the game that you bring to the table.

If you bring a good game, you're generally going to get good wish lists coming out of it. The problem is just what is a good game? Do you know what it is that a good game is? Is it the sauce? Is it the pitch? Is it the capsule? The better the game is you bring to Nextfest in the first place, the more wishes you're going to get out of it. If you join the NextFest with a 100 wish lists, it's probably not going to be a good Nexus for you.

If you join with a game that's already validated, it's got 5,000 wish list, 10,000 wish list, NextFest is going to be extremely extremely worth it for you. So, if you're watching this, that the where next step is very easy. If you already have a Steam app credit, go and register your game right now. Even if you're not really even certain, oh, I'm going to join the October next festival. So, no, the deadline at least when this video is coming out is still open for two weeks.

So, just register, put in the date. You can unregister at any time and then start planning of okay, I want to join with a demo. How should I design the demo? How long should I go? What features should I put into it? What's the call to action going to be like? All of those things. And check your Steam page as well. Like I said, there's a lot of resources on this channel. We've been making videos for multiple years now.

All of our experiences, all the learnings and all that. So, if this is the first video that you see of us, you probably want to click on like the the Bite Me Games button and just go to the channel and look at some more videos because I think there is an extremely high amount of value in here. Uh that's all basically that. Go and watch this video now. Everything a demo needs. I think that is going to give you most of the questions answered and otherwise thank you very much for watching.

Let me know in the comments down below what you thought of this format of video and also if there's anything else you would like one of these full guides on. That's all I had to say. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.