Watching “Next Fest Q&A August 2024”, where members of the Steam Business Team answer developers’ questions about registering for and getting the most out of Steam Next Fest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5mOX9iyO9A

The way October’s Next Fest will be organized is different from the previous ones, with changes to how the demos and storefronts will work.

• You can have a standalone demo page now, which will also let people add reviews just for the demo.
• You can now have the demo and the full game installed simultaneously
• Live streams will no longer be front-paged, and there will not be a live stream schedule. You can still live stream if you want, but you can do it whenever you want and the streams will be featured on a different tab.
• Adding a new feature called “trailer TV”
• Trying to show games in the most random way possible at the beginning of next fest to gather data, which will then be used to change how the game is recommended later that week. Games which consumers respond positively to will get more exposure. (unsure how they evaluate this)

Questions and answers:

• You can of course playtest your game separately during the event, but Steam doesn’t recommend doing this since you’re splitting your audience between the demo and the playtest.
• Trailers, or any other store content, that has not been published yet will not be used as part of Next Fest or any other sale.
• Before, emails were sent whenever you released your demo. However, they usually have a press preview event where press can preview the games in next fest and they usually prefer picking games they can actually play. So, they made it possible for you to release the demo without sending out an email. You have up to two weeks to send the email and Steam recommends doing it when next fest happens.
• You should be able to stream to both pages if you have separate pages for the full game and demo, but they aren’t sure.
• Live streaming will not be a visibility and discovery mechanism for next fest, as it will only be available for consumers to see after they load the game page. It’s expected that it will only be used for people to be able to see what the game is like to play.
• Steam has no expectations of exclusivity for Next Fest.
• The press preview is a list of games which is sent to Steam’s press list along with a link to the preview page for Next Fest. There’s no special access, so they will only be able to play demos that are available to the general public.
• Steam recommends that you leave the demo up after Next Fest ends so that players who haven’t gotten around to it can still play it.
• Adding a coming soon banner to your demo game doesn’t do anything for the full game. You’ll have to set your full game up with a coming soon banner.
• Pre-purchase titles can participate in Next Fest
• Standalone pages are intentionally designed to have no benefit or detraction for visibility.
• Steam is a trend-following platform and not a trend-creation platform. For marketing, you should be where your customers are — and your customers might not be on Steam yet.
• They will not share how the sorting algorithms decide on featured games.
• For live streaming, multiple Steam accounts can stream to the store page, but they need to be given permission to do that.
• Steam is trying to focus on showing new and exciting games to customers, and they felt that live streaming was interrupting that. They want developers to focus on making good demos.
• They are trying to highlight a broad variety of games on the page. Whether your games has zero wishlists or a million, they should be treated the same.
• Next Fest will not include games that have already been released.
• They are seeing more participation from developers and players in Next Fest, but a lot of developers tend to drop out even though they are registered because they are not ready yet, so it is hard for Steam to predict how many games will be part of Next Fest.
• Next Fest happens every year in February, June, and October.
• There is an official trailer for Next Fest, but there will be very few games in that trailer and they don’t expect that to be the way players discover games. it’s only for highlighting the variety of games and drawing people to the event.
• You can only participate in Next Fest once. In the first few Next Fests, they allowed this resulted in players feeling like that the Next Fest was just like the last one.
• The separate demo page is intended specifically to give you the ability to describe the demo in more detail if it has different features or to get feedback from players in reviews. Again, it’s designed to have no effect on visibility and discovery.
• They are going to use the tags to figure out which games to recommend to players. For example, if they know someone is into strategy games they will try to show strategy games to that player.
• You can register even if you don’t have a coming soon page yet, but you will need to have it up when the event starts.
• You’re not allowed to remove reviews after the demo has been updated.
• Reviews have no effect on visibility in Next Fest. It doesn’t matter if the reviews are positive or negative, they’re not considered at all. People are generally pretty happy to be able to play something for free.

Next Fest is on October 14th.