Latest Steam Next Fest attracted record 11.4 million players — dive into top games' metrics and genres
Valve has shared some stats for its latest Steam Next Fest ended on June 26. We decided to dig into more data to see how the top games and their demos performed in terms of CCU, new followers, and other metrics.
Valve recently announced that the June edition of Steam Next Fest attracted 11.4 million players. It is a new record for the series of events.
The company also unveiled the top 50 demos ordered by the number of unique players during the fest. Here are the 10 most played games:
- House Flipper 2 — sequel to the popular simulation game about property renovation from developer Frozen District and publisher PlayWay;
- Lies of P — Pinocchio-inspired soulslike title by South Korean developer Round8 Studio;
- Viewfinder — spatial puzzler where the player has to blaze trails and reshape reality using an instant camera;
- Warhaven — multiplayer PvP action game from South Korean publisher/developer Nexon;
- Wizard with a Gun — Devolver-published co-op survival sandbox title by Galvanic Games;
- Little Kitty, Big City — cute adventure game from Double Dagger Studio;
- Sea of Stars — charming turn-based RPG inspired by classic games in the genre from The Messenger developer Sabotage Studio;
- Hammerwatch II — sequel to Crackshell’s hack and slash game and its roguelite followup Heroes of Hammerwatch;
- The Invincible — sci-fi exploration game based on Stanisław Lem’s novel of the same name;
- Thronefall — strategy title by Grizzly Games, which offers more simplified and minimalist gameplay than most other games in the genre.
Top demos by peak concurrent players
Let’s take a look at the top 10 game demos from Steam Next Fest by peak concurrent users (CCU), according to SteamDB. Although Lies of P has a peak CCU of 15,761, the game achieved this milestone on June 8, so the main hype was before the event.
During the week of June 19-26, Round8 Studio’s soulslike title only peaked at 1,870 concurrent players. That’s why it ranks fifth among all demos from Valve’s top 50 (see the image below).
The same goes for other games that released their demos earlier, as we only looked at how they performed during the fest.
Top 10 game demos from Steam Next Fest by peak concurrent players (via SteamDB)
Games with the most followers
Steam Next Fest has proven to be a great tool for boosting visibility of upcoming games. If we look at titles that participated in the latest event, 13 of them currently have over 20,000 lifetime followers. 27 have over 10,000 followers.
Below are the top Steam Next Fest games by follower count (excluding already released projects).
Top 10 upcoming games from June’s Steam Next Fest by the current number of followers (via SteamDB)
However, some games have their Steam pages live way longer than others — e.g. Sea of Stars, which has been growing its follower base since 2020. So it makes sense to take a look at the titles that managed to gain the most new followers for the week of June 19-26:
- Warhaven — +4,060;
- Viewfinder — +4,039;
- Bellwright — +3,514;
- Sea of Stars — +3,340;
- Norland — +3,330;
- Lies of P — +3,268;
- The Invincible — +2,955;
- Let’s School — +2,825;
- Eternights — +2,704;
- Hammerwatch II — +2,675.
Top 20 upcoming games from Steam Next Fest with the most new followers (via SteamDB)
On average, games in Steam Next Fest’s top 50 gained 1,686 new followers between June 19 and June 26 (median is 1,509).
For the sake of fun, we can also sort titles by percentage change in the number of followers during that period to see how the event helped some smaller games get a huge boost compared to their pre-Next Fest slow growth.
- Bellwright — +955%
- Mythforce — +533%
- Land Above Sea Below — +238%
- Thronefall — +193%
- Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master — +108%
- En Garde! — +84%
- Primitive Society Simulator — +74%
- Starsiege: Deadzone — +61%
- Hammerwatch II — +58%
- The Matchless Kungfu — +51%
Games with the most wishlists
Wishlists are one of the most important metrics, but their number is only visible to developers. However, we can see where Next Fest games currently rank among the most wishlisted upcoming Steam games.
- 27 titles made the top 200.
- 11 games made the top 100.
- 6 titles made the top 50.
Top 10 most wishlisted games from Steam Next Fest and their position in the global charts (via SteamDB)
Although we can’t say how many wishlists each game from the latest Next Fest has, there is a way to make some estimates. According to GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless, wishlists are currently between 7x and 20x the followers (based on an anonymous survey of Steam developers).
The average multiplier is 12.37x, and the median is 12x. It is worth noting that average multipliers depend on the number of factors, including game tags (they are significantly lower for complex strategies than for narrative-driven titles).
Most common genres
To see what genres were the most popular during the latest Steam Next Fest, let’s take a look at the top 5 tags for each game.
Unsurprisingly, Strategy is the undisputed leader with 15 titles in the top 50 using this tag. Steam players love complex games with deep mechanics and high replayability. That’s why we also see a lot of tags like Simulation (9), City Builder (8), Colony Sim (8), and Survival (6).
Most common tags for Steam Next Fest games
During the June’s Next Fest, there were also 10 games with the RPG tag, followed by Action (9), Adventure (8), and Sandbox (8).
Interestingly, five games used the Medieval tag. We don’t know if that’s saying something, but three of them — Warhaven, Hammerwatch II, and Thronefall — made it into Valve’s top 10 games by the number of unique players.
Other most common tags include Multiplayer, Puzzle, Exploration, and Relaxing — each used in five games.
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The June edition of Steam Next Fest proved that the event remains one of the best free marketing tools for game developers, as it allows them to showcase their games to thousands of players. These events are also great for growing followers and wishlist additions, especially for smaller creators in dire need of attention in the oversaturated market.
