A Modest Proposal for Improving Steam Next Fests

Before we get started, I just want to express my hope that this article’s carefully-chosen title was enough to grab the attention of any English Literature majors in our audience. With that said, a Steam Next Fest has just ended as I write this article. That was enough to get me thinking about how these festivities could be improved and expanded upon going forward if Valve and the legions of game developers who call Steam home are willing to consider my suggestions.

The idea for this article arose primarily from my frustration with the most recent Steam Next Fest. Furthermore, I admit that I’m primarily writing this piece for the benefit of those in a similar position to my own, who use events like Next Fests as a reliable source of written content for sites like Phenixx Gaming. Having said that, it occurs to me that I should probably clarify exactly why it was that I felt so bothered because of something so trivial as a Next Fest.

I’ll bet I can guess what you’re thinking: “It’s just a collection of several hundred game demos and developer live streams that we Steam users have a week to explore. What’s so distressing about that?” Well, I’ll tell you. I had a conversation with Alexx about this very topic a few nights ago, which is another reason I decided to put pen to paper for this purpose. I mentioned to Alexx that I had read in a relevant article that during February 2022’s Next Fest, there were upwards of 600 playable game demos that players could download and try out at their leisure.

In response to that, Alexx and I both spent a while pondering whether or not there existed even a single outlet similar to Phenixx Gaming which was capable of playing and producing content upon so much as one-tenth of all those demos during the paltry seven-day time frame of the Next Fest. Personally, I downloaded somewhere between ten and twelve demos during the most recent Next Fest, with the intent of playing all of them and subsequently producing preview articles on the content they demonstrated.

However, due to an infernal combination of external obligations, my state of general physical malaise, and the fact that I was only allotted a week to play up to twelve decently-sized game demos, I only ended up getting around to a single one of the demos I had picked out. The late musician Meat Loaf is widely known for having asserted that “two out of three ain’t bad,” but something tells me he would feel somewhat differently about one out of twelve. That brings me to my first suggestion as to how future Steam Next Fests could be improved, especially for gaming journalists like my colleagues and I.

This one is also the simplest recommendation I have for Valve and anyone else whose involvement is crucial to a successful Next Fest. If you’re going to have hundreds (if not close to a thousand) game demos playable at once, just make them all available for play for a period longer than a week. I would prefer to see Next Fests last for a period between two and three weeks at most. I believe that amount of time would allow everyone who’s interested plenty of opportunities to check out all the demos they’ve got their eye on and then some without the event going on long enough to overstay its welcome.

Before I move on, there are two intertwined things I wish to more thoroughly address about the point I’ve just made. I’m well aware that not everyone who downloads a demo during a Next Fest is going to create content on that demo for an external outlet. Those people, therefore, are not under such strict time constraints to play any demo they download and determine whether or not they’re interested in the full game whenever it releases. That is to say, not everyone who participates in a Next Fest has to worry about the same sorts of things as people like me do.

In fact, I strongly suspect the vast majority of Steam users don’t have these same concerns. However, I also believe that if Valve and company are interested in making Steam Next Fests even more popular and well-liked than they may well already be, they should simply give players more than just 168 hours to explore everything each Next Fest has to offer. I also realize there are many Steam users who are only interested in a small handful of demos on specific games they’ve been following for a while.

For this category of people, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if a week is more than enough time for them to play all the demos they want and move on. That’s why I think Valve needs to find an appropriate balance between giving people who want to play more than one or two demos per Next Fest enough time to do so and not having each extravaganza last long enough that anyone else finds its presence annoying.

My next point has to do with how Valve categorizes and displays each demo that’s on offer during any given Next Fest. Don’t get me wrong, the February 2022 event, in particular, managed to really impress me based on how the available demos were displayed and could easily be accessed and downloaded right from the Next Fest’s front page. Players could also quickly add any games which had playable demos to their Steam wishlists from that same page, which meant they wouldn’t have to navigate to any game’s standalone Steam Store page and wishlist the game from there.

What I want to suggest on this front ties in with my previous recommendation. Regardless of whether or not Valve elects to extend the duration of any future such events, I think it would really help if a method were included whereby game developers and/or publishers could quickly and easily notify potential players that the demos of any of their games would remain active even after the current Next Fest has concluded.

I bring that up because I know of a fair few studios who simply use events like Next Fests to launch their game demos in a way that will potentially garner their offerings significantly more attention than they would otherwise receive. These devs and publishers commonly go on to leave their game demos active even without a Next Fest or similar event to go along with them. That tends to be quite a nice gesture more often than not.

Well, folks, that constitutes the entirety of my personal methodology as to how Valve could improve Steam Next Fests going forward. I do sincerely hope they’re willing to consider suggestions like mine, especially if game journalists like myself make enough noise on the subject.

I’m curious, though: do you have any recommendations for improving events like Next Fests that could be added to this list? What might those be? Furthermore, did you participate in the most recent Next Fest at all, regardless of whether you’re a game developer or just a gamer? Do feel free to let me know your thoughts in this article’s comments!