Which games hit big in Steam's February Next Fest?

We deconstruct the winners, the algorithms, and the featuring. Also: newwws.

[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.]

We’re back, excited to dig into what’s becoming a pretty busy Q1 2024 in the PC/console game biz, with multiple new-IP hits (hey, Palworld & Enshrouded), as well as existing-IP breakouts (Helldivers 2, Persona 3 Reload & Granblue Fantasy: Relink.)

And we’re fresh off the U.S. Superbowl extravaganza, where Microsoft’s ad for ‘everyday AI companion’ Copilot included an aspirational youth typing: "Write code for my 3d open world game" into Copilot’s interface, with example output. (Whether AI is coming for all of us or not: in the short-term, it’s def. consuming marketing dollars!)

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The big winners of February’s Steam Next Fest?

But let’s start today’s newsletter with a look at the just-concluded Steam February 2024 Next Fest. This majorly-featured PC demo showcase ends up becoming a fascinating look at the bigger trends in PC gaming. (Previously: Oct.23, Jun.23, Feb.23.)

Is this Next Fest busier than the others, btw? Look, they’re all busy, guv! But Gary Burchell had an interesting stat there: “This is the follower count of the top 24 games on the 'Most Wishlisted' tab on the opening day of recent Next Fests: Jun 2023 = 327,285; Oct 2023 = 376,081; Feb 2024 = 421,484.” So if nothing else, ‘bigger’ games are participating?

You can see the top 10 demos by our favored metric, ‘Steam follower increase during Next Fest’, above. However, only about half of them overlap with Steam’s own ‘Top 10 most-played demos so far put out late last week - and there were almost 1,100 demos in total!

There’s all kinds of ways you can slice this. That’s why we made GameDiscoverCo’s giant ‘who performed in Feb. Next Fest?’ document (Google Drive link), which includes data on all Feb. Next Fest demos (!) ranked by follower increase and peak CCU (concurrent users), as well as ‘top tags’ & more.

Here’s an alternate view: top 20 demos by ‘highest CCU during event’, which maps almost exactly with that Steam list of most-played demos, as it happens:

So what kind of games hit big, this time out? Let’s try to name and classify them, at least a little bit:

• Dungeonborne rode the ‘Dark & Darker’ trend, in a vacuum: February 2023’s Next Fest saw first-person co-op permadeath dungeon explorer Dark & Darker break out big (108k CCU!), before getting removed from Steam in a legal dispute. PC Gamer is not alone in noting that Mithril’s Dungeonborne ‘goes there’ too, and #1 in CCU and follower increase shows that players are interested! (Dungeon Stalkers is another in this PvPvE microgenre..)

• Lots of ‘sandbox x survival’ titles continue to do well: the very intriguing Pacific Drive - which is out in 10 days - had a Top 10 performance for both CCU & follower increase, and Soulmask also picked up interest. On the less brutal side, farming sandbox Lightyear Frontier and ‘mine x explore x basebuild’ sequel TerraTech Worlds also charted. These are all big, expansive open-world games!

• ‘Big hook’ autobattlers & deckbuilders also charted: inventory management autobattler Backpack Battlers, which had a huge demo pre-Fest, performed well within it, too. And poker roguelike deckbuilder Balatro had a Top 10 performance in our charts, alongside other promising deckbuilders like Breachway.

Not everything fit into a neat box, though. Klei’s Rotwood takes a roguelike approach to a side-scrolling 2D co-op brawler, and also charting high were turn-based 4X Millennia, Blizzard-y trad RTS Stormgate & Homeworld-y RTS Homeworld 3. Oh, and Deviator and Never Grave - two Metroidvanias, the latter from the Palworld folks.

As for the most-used Steam tags? Looking at the Top 5 tags for the top 60-ish games by peak CCU, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that Strategy (14) and Simulation (8) head the chart. But here’s some other top-charting tags Online Co-Op (7), Survival & Sandbox (6), and Building (5) - the full list is in the document.

Re: ‘how top tags relate to each other’, Plus subscriber Michael Chan again generated us a graph of the Top 5 Steam tags across the Top 10 Next Fest games by CCU:

Next, just for some context in terms of how certain demos performed versus the many hundreds of others in Next Fest:

• The biggest games outperformed the ‘longer tail’ in a major way: as per normal, a few games got outsized attention, with Dungeonborne hitting almost 20,000 CCU - yet there were only 18 titles in the entire Next Fest whose demo made it over 1,000 CCU. Def. some ‘big get bigger’ vibes here…

• Sizing by ‘new people who followed your Steam page’? So you can grok the ‘long tail’: the Top 50 demos during this Next Fest added at least 750 Steam followers during the event (10-15,000 wishlists?), the Top 100 around 300 followers, and the Top 250 around 100 followers (more like 1,200 to 2,000 wishlists?)

• Sizing by ‘peak demo CCU’ during Next Fest?: a basic summation indicates that the Top 50 demos hit 200 CCU during the event, the Top 100 around 110 CCU, and the Top 250 around 25 CCU. (CCU may not be relevant for single-player games, but it’s a useful public estimation tool.)

Finally, if you want some ‘best Next Fest games’ editorials, there’s a bunch out there. YouTuber SkillUp had himself and his co-workers pick their favorite 20, Polygon chose a bunch of neat demos, most of which we haven’t had time to cover, PC Gamer chunked through some favorites, and wow, this really is an embarrassment of riches.

How about Next Fest’s algorithms & featuring?

Before we jet out of here, we did want to talk about Next Fest’s ‘trending’ algorithm, after we devoted a newsletter section to it last Monday. We felt like it might show more games on the ‘front page’ and discourage early ‘paid for’ inorganic demo pushes.

Well, what really happened? Here’s what we noticed. The top demos in ‘trending’ didn’t change quite as much as we expected. But it was possible to launch a demo later - as Homeworld 3 did on Fest Day 1 - and surge higher up the ‘Trending’ charts.

So this revised algorithm seems to split the difference well between the old Popular algo (‘if you launched early and blasted streamers, nobody launching on Day 1 of Next Fest could catch up?’), and a trigger-happy ‘any slightly trending game can do great’. No notes!

Secondly, we saw some chatter that Steam didn’t promote Next Fest as much as it used to, later in the week. Some Next Fests in the past had 3 to 6 days of ‘front page takeover banner’, and another big ‘takeunder’ banner (between ‘featured and recommended’ and ‘special offers’) for the rest of the week-long event.

However, this time the Next Fest takeover was removed on the third day in favor of a Yu-Gi.Oh! Master Duel 2nd anniversary sale, and even the ‘takeunder’ was a) briefly non-appearing, and then b) shared with promos like the Steam Lunar New Year sale.

So the general trend, as more stuff is happening on Steam, is that Next Fest promotion is fading a little faster. This probably isn’t the end of the world - and we didn’t see any major slowing of interest as a result. But it’s something to keep in mind..

The game discovery news round-up…

After all that Next Fest kerfuffle, let’s settle down and finish things out with the latest game discovery and platform news. Which goes something like this:

• In ‘what’s new, pussycat?’ news, Xbox is doing a (video-based?) podcast this Thursday starring “Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Booty as they share updates on the Xbox business.” This comes after an internal townhall in which Spencer told employees “there were no plans to stop making consoles”. So.. what? We’ll see!

• You might have seen that Disney invested a mere $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic, in order to make a “new persistent universe… interoperated with Fortnite” where consumers can “play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more.” That $ gets Disney a 9% share of Epic, it’s claimed, valuing Epic at $22.5 billion. (That’s down from the $31.5 billion valuation that Kirkbi (Lego) and Sony invested at in April 2022.)

• More PC/console charts? In the UK, GSD thinks that 3% less games were sold year on year, though “EA Sports FC 24 actually had a better January than its predecessor”, and 12.4 million games were sold in Europe, down 7%. Caveat: “Palworld would likely have made the charts, but the data only covers digital games from most major publishers.”

• One of those super-useful ‘master list of game publishers’ databases, this one from Alan D, just got updated, and according to him: “Some have changed names, but even more have closed up shop and I needed to confirm. The list went from ~310 down to ~287, good luck out there.” Here’s the link.

• Arrowhead & Sony’s ‘shoot bugs with your buddies’ banger Helldivers 2 (above) has been going big on PC and PlayStation - as Plus subscribers who read our exclusive Friday newsletter are aware. Arrowhead’s CEO Johan Pilestedt has been talking success on Twitter, revealing a 220k CCU total on Saturday, and clarifying later it’s 50:50 between Steam and PS5 SKUs. (More fuel for simultaneous console & PC releases for PlayStation or Xbox as publishers, right?)

• Video game companies and layoffs are a constant companion right now, and IGN’s Rebekah Valentine tries to dig into the bigger trends behind it, talking to those affected. Why? Some mismanagement, yes, but “it seems like the number of games that are able to justify their massive costs is on the decline”, she also concludes.

• Newly spotted: some data shared by Take-Two which “said 77 million current-gen consoles had been sold as of December 31, 2023”. This implies - if you take Sony’s ‘50 million PS5s on December 9th, 2023’ announce into account, that “PlayStation 5 had outsold Xbox Series X/S by around 2-to-1 as of the end of 2023.”

• VC Matthew Ball, who was very high profile in championing 'the metaverse', tries to document why the phrase got overhyped*, and the biggest tech companies are pivoting to phrases like ‘spatial computing' and the ‘spatial Internet’ as they play up mixed reality. (*Something he significantly contributed to, heehee.)

• Top mobile games of January 2024, according to Appmagic & MobileGamer.biz? The top-grossing games are headed by Honor Of Kings, Monopoly Go and Royal Match, whereas the most-downloaded are topped by Royal Match (again!), Roblox, Block Blast & Subway Surfers.

• Steam devs who have a game that runs on the Deck, and a demo or playtest that gamers can access now? The Steam Deck unofficial Discord server has a new ‘Try My Game’ channel, if you’d like to get some enthusiastic third-parties to give you informal feedback on how it performs on Valve’s portable games device.

Finally, GameDiscoverCo coder Avi has already requested this as a business expense, but The Pokemon Company is restocking its life-sized Psyduck plush, “both stunning and perpetually stunned by its chronic headaches”, for ‘just’ $325. Ow, our wallets/head:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency 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 consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]