I generally look forward to these little demo fests. While it’s never exactly been a flood of mind blowing games, I usually find a handful of upcoming games that stand out and show some promise. This time around, though, I’m left dispirited by all the slop flooding the lists. Generated slop. Asset-flip slop. The few games that aren’t I only find after wading through pages upon pages of rubbish, and then it’s a crapshoot on if it seems worth downloading. I eventually gave up and don’t have much interest in trying again.
I’ve long been a fan and supporter of the indie scene, understanding that the diamonds that make it worth it take effort to find. But if this is what we have to look forward to, I’m concerned how it’ll fare as the requisite effort to sift through the dregs grows exponentially. Eventually it’s just too much.
Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it’s a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).
The idea is that it gives games that don’t have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren’t popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.
Interesting. I was wondering why there wasn’t the usual “Most Popular Demos” button on the main page.