Which games hit big in Steam's Feb. 2025 Next Fest?
Also: the top new Steam games of February, and a whole bunch more...
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Yep, we’ve been tracking Steam Next Fest demo showcases for a few editions - here’s our pieces from October 2024, June 2024, February 2024, October 2023, June 2023, and February 2023, if you missed out. And it’s happening again! Today’s GDCo main newsletter story looks at the latest Feb. 2025 Next Fest showcase in much detail…
Before we start, wanted to shout out the daftest game in Next Fest, Gil Lawson’s Rogue Light Deck Builder, in which you are a rogue… building… a light deck. (The silliest pun.) It features “achingly-detailed physical simulations of swinging a hammer around to whang on some nails”, and some fun masocore physics gameplay, too….
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Game discovery news: Feb. topped by big trio…
Let’s commence proceedings with a look at the discovery and platform shenanigans over the last few days, shall we?
GameDiscoverCo took a look at the top-grossing new Steam games for Feb. 2025 (above), with Kingdom Come: Deliverance II #1 by some way ($118.9m), with over 2 million units sold on Steam alone. (It's done >600k more units on console, but its 'hardcore' gameplay & the medieval setting make it strongest on PC.)
We had Monster Hunter Wilds at #2 ($69.1m), but it launched ~24 hours before the end of Feb, and it’s now at >$185m Steam gross, and shooting up further. Sid Meier's Civilization VII (#3) did $66.1m on Steam in Feb, buoyed by a lot of pre-orders. The Steam chart then fades off quickly, to Avowed ($13.1m), Pirate Yakuza ($7.7m), and down from there…
The ‘not-E3’ agenda for June 2025 in Los Angeles around Summer Game Fest has had IGN Live’s streaming showcase and event re-confirmed. It wasn’t huge last year, but nice to see physical public events hanging in there, and it’s another co-located thing to check out.
Although U.S. tariffs with Mexico, Canada, and China are 'definitely on' as of press time, America hasn’t produced clear indications on affected goods. (Console prices could increase, but we’re still betting that digital game platforms will be waaaay down the list, enforcement-wise…)
The semi-Brit centric BAFTA Games nominations are here, and sporting “11 nominations for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II… eight nominations each for Astro Bot and Still Wakes the Deep… seven nominations for Thank Goodness You’re Here!… six nominations for Black Myth: Wukong… five nominations for Helldivers II.”
Victoria Tran has an excellent newsletter on ‘dealing with community expectations’ for hot games, suggesting those dealing with the ravenous public should “regulate yourself… find the common ground, then share realistic details.. filter out the noise.. ensure you're communicating properly… [and] utilize your community.” (More within.)
How important are previous console generations to the biggest franchises? Well, a new CharlieIntel report (via VGC) suggests “that Activision could be releasing its 2025 Call of Duty game on last gen’s machines, 5 years after the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S were released.” Given 50% of PlayStation MAUs were on PS4 last May, we get it.
Game footage ‘clipping & sharing’ app Medal.tv has a neat ‘trends’ page where you can see which games are swiftly rising in their ‘most clipped’ list. In this case, it’s online co-op horror/goofy game R.E.P.O., which is riding that new Lethal Company subgenre trend to 60k+ Steam CCU and 3.3% of all recent Medal clips.
Former Blizzard/Flagship exec Bill Roper has a detailed post on the difficulty of getting funding, revealing two funding attempts - at $18.5m and now at $5.5m - and noting: “No one signs games that don’t have fully playable demos (and that has now evolved into requiring a vertical slice) while, in the same breath, no one is funding demos.”
ICYMI: Steam finally hit the 40 million CCU benchmark at the weekend, with the key PC game platform making it to 40.27m concurrent online users, with 12.7m in-game players: “For reference, the 30 million [CCU] mark was surpassed in Oct. 2022.”
Twitch’s plans for 2025? According to Eurogamer’s summary of CEO Dan Clancy’s open letter, “new ways of collaborating, mobile improvements, and more monetization” were the key points, since “Twitch is opening up monetisation for "most" streamers, such as subscriptions and bits.”
Some interesting academic research on Steam out of the UK: “In 2019, Steam introduced a new review system which decreased the exposure of users to previous ratings…A 10 percent increase in average rating increases the probability a review is positive by 5.4% before the policy change, but only by 2.8% after.”
Finally: this research from Vox Media & The Verge on ‘the future of the Internet’ is well worth reading: “Big platforms are losing trust, and disruption is here… Content drives community, even for digital experiences… Smaller, purpose-driven communities are the future.” (There’s a deck with lots of survey result %s, too….)
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Which games hit big in the Feb. 2025 Next Fest?
So last week’s Steam Next Fest demo showcase was another ‘big boy’ - not quite as large as Oct. 2024’s, which we pegged as 2,700-3,100 games*, but still around 2,300-2,500 titles, the #2 of all time. (*The # of games shifts around at the start of Next Fest as people opt out of demo-ing - or Valve opts them out ‘cos no valid demo exists!)
Steam has already put out its list of the Top 50 most-played Next Fest demos by unique players during the week-long event. But we’ve put together our traditional giant spreadsheet of Next Fest data (Google Drive link), and it’s got data on the ranking of every single game in the Fest in terms of peak demo CCU and added followers.
Let’s start with the biggest Steam follower increases from Feb. 23rd-March 3rd (above), with wishlists during Next Fest likely increasing at 12-20x the rate of followers, btw. Here’s what we spotted:
Mecha Break was the breakout of the Fest, but mainly in Asia: as we noted last week, third-person Gundam-esque multiplayer shooter Mecha Break (#1, +16,400 followers) did tremendously well. But it’s the only Asia-first game in the Top 10, and is more of a ‘happened to be timed’ demo than a true ‘winner cos of Next Fest’.
Existing IP filled out a chunk, but not all of the Top 10: classic German RPG update Gothic 1 Remake (#2, +7,400), Dune: Awakening (#5, +6,000) and Game Of Thrones: Kingsroad (#6, +5,700) all performed. And you can argue RoadCraft (#4, +6,500) is ‘existing IP’, since it’s a MudRunner-y game made by the same devs.
Co-op adventure crafters took up a lot of the remaining space: a lot of the above IP-based games had co-op, survival, and crafting elements. So it’s not surprising to see dungeon adventurer Fellowship (#3, +7,200), cozy survival-er Solar Punk (#7, +4,800), and skyship co-op survival-er Lost Skies (#8, +4,600) also in the mix.
Once again, here’s the Top 5 Steam tags for each game in this Top 10, plotted for us (kindly!) by AccelByte’s Michael Chan. And there’s some major overlaps this time, especially around Online Co-Op and Open World Survival Craft:
If you compare these top games to Steam’s list of top Next Fest titles by unique players (tab #3 in Doc!), it’s similar. But some casual, shorter-play games are lower in the Top 50 follower increase list, but are high in Valve’s ‘unique players’ countdown. Examples? The impostor-ific Among Us 3D (#2, +10 places in uniques) and drug dealer sim (!) Schedule I (#10, +33 places in uniques).
Finally for this section, we did take a look at the peak CCU - concurrent users - during the event of all 2,300+ games in Next Fest. And here’s what we’ve got:
As you can see, we had to make a special bridging section in the graph (!) for Mecha Break, thanks to its 304,000 CCU demo (?!) during Next Fest. It’s followed by many titles we already discussed: Fellowship, RoadCraft, Among Us 3D and Gothic 1 Remake all making it >10k CCU during the Fest, a super impressive set of results.
There’s a few other games in these top charts that we haven’t seen elsewhere - MOBA-style action roguelike Shape Of Dreams (8,000 CCU), survival horror RPG title Stygian: Outer Gods (4,200 CCU), and keyboard typer idle game (?!) Bongo Cat (3,300 CCU) also in the mix.
Finally, since some games launched their demo the week before Next Fest - or occasionally before that - their top demo CCU - and significant follower/wishlist growth, in some cases, actually happened before the Fest started. (Our full document has games in the Top 50 marked in red if that’s the case.)
Looking at these: there’s a few titles like roguelike deckbuilder Monster Train 2 and 2D zombie survival title Into The Dead: Our Darkest Days that would have sneaked into the Top 20 by CCU, counting pre-Fest data. (And The First Berserker: Khazan had its 4,400 CCU demo a few weeks ago.) But that’s not how our charts work!
Are games doing better, worse in new Next Fests?
Finally, since most of you are probably not in the top 1-2% of Next Fest demos, we wanted to look again at trends over time for a wider range of games. Above is our data on the ‘Steam follower increase’ data for everything from the #1 to #500 games for the last four Next Fests.
And if you look at this in isolation, it actually looks pretty strong. Our notes:
The top 5 Next Fest games are pretty static, popularity-wise, year on year: if you look at Feb 2024 to Feb 2025, it’s fairly similar, up about 3%. So the top games do about the same.
The #25-#100 games in Feb. 2025’s Next Fest had more interest, YoY: if you compare to Feb. 2024, the #25 game had 25% more follower interest than this time last year, and the #100 game had a whopping 61% more interest. That’s… good?
There’s a massive caveat in here - the number of games in the Fest: this all sounds all well and good. But with roughly twice as many games in the Feb. 2025 Next Fest, it’s presumably 2x as difficult to make it to the #25 game by interest!
So, urged on by some comments after the last Next Fest analysis, we’ve also worked out Steam follower increase by ‘top games by percentage’. This is basically ‘what does it take to get to the top 10% of all games in Next Fest?’ And we get different numbers:
This chart reinforces that the October 2024 Next Fest was a poorly performing one, for whatever reason. (We suspect it’s partly to do with the types of games who choose to be in Feb. vs. October - there’s just a better default line-up and less ‘noise’ in Feb.)
So, while being in the top 10% of all Steam follower increases for Feb. 2025 nets you at least 256 extra followers (what, around 4,000-5,000 wishlists?), up 87% on Oct. 2024’s, that milestone is still down 26% on what ‘the top 10%’ added in Feb. 2024.
That’s the story of video games and Next Fest in recent years - the competition is great, and fierce. Here’s similar numbers for CCU:
As you can see, the demo CCU of the #25 game in Next Fest has been increasing handily since June 2023 - up from 446 CCU to 974 CCU. (This is due to three things: more people paying attention to Next Fest, more high quality games in general, and more games releasing Next Fest-timed demos, we reckon.)
Then, if we look at CCU across the period of the last four Next Fests if using ‘Top X% by percentage’, we’ll see - actually - relatively flat numbers from Feb. 2024 to Feb. 2025, and another indication that Oct. 2024’s Next Fest - also the first one with the ‘egalitarian’ format change - was relatively disappointing:
It’s interesting to see CCU constancy, year on year (except the Top 1%, which we’re guessing is due to the algorithm change), but a bit of a follower fall-off. Perhaps it’s more people ‘trying’ and not following or wishlisting, or perhaps something else?
Concluding: wow, that’s a lot of data. But you only get to insight by quantifying some of it. And we have to say, separately of the numbers - there’s a lot of good new games in Next Fest, yet again. You should all be proud! Toodles…
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]