FIGHT KNIGHT

There’s been a lot of discussion about the viability of Steam Next Fest recently, and first of all, I strongly recommend reading all the historical deep dives on NF data by GameDiscoverCo and How To Market A Game. Yes…NF has become ridiculously crowded, but what if the median WL gain hasn’t actually changed that much in the last 6 years? It’s easy to say that AI slop is killing your visibility but is that actually the case? For starters, the number of NF games that get almost no attention has always been very high. Even long before this AI slop era. Steam randomizes the games heavily for the first few days, but even then NF typically settles into a rhythm after the first 24 hours where all the discourse tends to be about the same 25ish games. As usual, the cream rises to the top, but having some marketing momentum behind you certainly helps! So what has changed? I think the gamers have. NF 5 or 6 years ago was a much more niche event. There were fewer games, but there were also fewer players. I think players back then were the sort who enjoyed playing demos, offering feedback, submitting bug reports, and actively digging around for hidden gems. Now, due to a number of factors such as increased discussion around NF, more streamer coverage, and players being more open to trying smaller games (friendslop era effect?), I suspect NF has seen a pretty considerable influx of new players. And where do these players end up? Well, naturally, playing the top demos! We love to talk about the highs and lows on Twitter. The games that explode and get 100k WLs, and the games that didn’t even break 100. But those are the extremes. In between those are thousands of games, and the data suggests that a huge proportion of them gain only a few hundred WLs at most. That’s the reality of NF, and it has been for a long time. We want to blame AI, and sure, NF does have a lot of AI slop, but are gamers really that dumb? Is anyone actually playing this stuff? I suspect the vast majority of it sinks to the bottom and rots almost immediately, just like low-effort games did long before AI existed. I’m not saying that discoverability isn’t getting harder, or that AI slop isn’t a problem. It absolutely is. But I do think we’re far too quick to brand every disappointing result on the number of games joining NF. If the number of games has exploded, but the number of players has also increased… and the median WL gains haven’t really collapsed, then perhaps NF isn’t becoming as bad as it might seem? There’s a lot of data out there and a lot of nuance to the discussion, so I think it’s just worth approaching carefully. I know it seems discouraging, and I know it might feel like you should give up, but don’t. NF has always been a gamble, and it’s a gamble I think is still worth taking.