Who 'won' February 2026's Steam Next Fest?

Also: lots of game platform & discovery news, as per usual.

[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.]

It’s the week after the week before, and so we’re back in your general area, doing the posting and the data and the results and the bibbedy floobidy. This time out: yes, we have all the Steam Next Fest data you ever wanted (and some you probably didn’t.)

Before we start, you may know video game YouTube essayist Ahoy from his videos on Doom, Quake & Monkey Island. But his latest video, ‘Brown’, surveys the history of top games’ color palette & saturation, discovering that 2016 was the brownest year for video games (Doom, Far Cry Primal), and 2001 (Halo, GTA 3) the least brown…

[WANNA CHECK OUT GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more. ]

Game discovery news: yr Steam PC has wot RAM?

Let’s check out the top game discovery & platform news to start, which is going a little bit like this:

• As I posted over on LinkedIn, the PC debut of Resident Evil Requiem is a “good opportunity to see Steam's new 'show my tech specs' box in action within player reviews… in this example, a player is saying the game runs smooth on his machine, and you can even _see_ his machine specs.” Smart idea by Steam, huh?

• Journalist Pierre-Hugues Meyer kindly wrote up ‘how to get press coverage during Next Fest’ for us, and it’s very real on the high volume of incoming: “I received emails for 157 different [Next Fest] games. I received the first email on January 28, and the last on February 25.” Lots of good tips on transparency & timing in there…

• As spotted on BlueSky, the New York AG case against Valve on loot boxes has the following capper: “Although this case is about illegal gambling, it is important to note that Valve’s promotion of games that glorify violence and guns helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence.” (Really, New York? Who lobbied for this suit?)

• Nintendo’s latest streaming Indie World showcase snuck up on us, and the highlights (PR) inc. neat roguelite brawler Rotwood insta-launching as a Switch 2 console exclusive, the puzzling Blue Prince making it to Switch 2, Deadzone: Rogue, Denshattack! & more. (There’s more Switch 2-only indies in this batch.)

• ICYMI: yes, video games platform Netflix won’t be acquiring Warner Bros (& Warner Bros Games!), but Paramount (likely?) will in a few months, including Rocksteady, TT Games, Avalanche Software & more. (Given needs for cost cuts, we do wonder what’ll happen to the remaining in-house studios.)

• PlayStation 5 lead architect Mark Cerny has revealed that Resident Evil Requiem for PS5 Pro shipped with a more advanced version of PSSR, “an AI library that analyzes game images pixel by pixel as it upscales them.” (Digital Foundry is super impressed with the PS5 Pro version of RE, too…)

• The latest unreleased trending Steam games in GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 25th-March 1st) include open-world fantasy ARPG Crimson Desert (#1) getting a ton of interest - should be '(un)expectedly' big on launch. And Slay The Spire 2 (#3), which is out this week and adds co-op to a winning formula.

• Naavik’s done a great ‘deep dive’ on UGC game trends, which includes a ton of detail on Roblox and more info on Fortnite Creative than we’ve seen recently, noting: “Across the top three ecosystems we measured (Roblox, Fortnite, and Overwolf), developer payouts were ~$2.2B in 2025, a +47% increase over 2024.”

• Various ‘sources’ and readers of tea-leaves are claiming that PlayStation may be looking more carefully about its push into PC games, as it looks to make money in the most efficient way. (No specifics yet, and it’s vague AF, but we’ve noticed diminishing returns on peak Steam CCU as more PlayStation games hit PC.)

• Microlinks: Frank Lantz on why there hasn’t been any significant new AI-based game experiences so far; Roblox launches inaugural Global Parent Council for parent input; some data on why YouTube Shorts is working for Uncanny Valley: Checkpoint, with ~1 million views and 6,000 organic wishlists so far.

OUR SPONSOR: FirstLook.gg: Build Better Gaming Communities

60 seconds. That’s all the time you have before a new player leaves your Discord forever. If your onboarding isn’t elite or your server is messy, you’ll bleed users.

We design and build high-performing game Discords from scratch. Get custom onboarding funnels, role systems, playtest tracking, and feedback capture built by the elite operators behind 1M+ member communities.

Stop losing players. Claim your free Discord setup + audit today! and scale faster.

Who ‘won’ February 2026’s Steam Next Fest?

OK, we did it again. We’ve done deep-dives on Next Fest for ages - here’s our Oct. 2025 NF analysis, also June 2025, Feb. 2025, Oct. 2024, June 2024, February 2024, Oct. 2023, June 2023, and February 2023. And so it’s time to turn the Eye Of Sauron to last week’s PC Steam demo showcase, which had a whoppin’ 3,500+ games to try.

Before we start, Valve’s Top 50 demos of Next Fest - listed sequentially by unique players - is a great kick-off point, since it gives you a strong flavor to add to our super-detailed data on every single Feb. 2026 Next Fest demo (Google Drive doc) we’ve once again pulled.

We like using Valve’s Top 10 most-played demos (above) as a starting point, since it’s official data and gives you a strong aroma of what’s going on. Here’s what we sniffed:

• A lot of the Top 10 this time out are pretty… recognizable: top of the charts is Marathon, whose late-breakin’ ‘server slam’ hit 143,000 CCU ahead of this week’s release. But otherwise: ‘castle on wheels’ roguelite Wanderburg (#7)? We covered its 150k trailer WLs. We also looked at camper van explorer Outbound (#6), pre-NF.

• There’s even a top pick we’ve seen before, under a different name: we were briefly confused by great-looking ‘age of piracy’ survival adventure Windrose (#2), whose demo topped out at 22,000 CCU. But turns out it had a rename from Crosswind, and its early demos previously made our ‘trending wishlists’ chart.

• We’re seeing a LOT of co-op experiences in the Top 10: wishlist-trending pre event, robot cowboy co-op shooter Far Far West (#5) had a great Fest, as did the good-looking co-op shooter John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando (#8). Oh, and impending ‘friendslop’ hit Burglin’ Gnomes (#2) is chaotically co-op as heck.

• The ‘wildcard’ game of the Fest? Literally, it’s Vampire Crawlers: the folks behind megahit Vampire Survivors (Poncle) demonstrated Vampire Crawlers (#4), which is a Dungeon Master-style first person dungeon crawler with card-based combat actions and roguelike fun. Looks like deliciously distilled pixel-y fun to us?

In fact, the general feel we get from Next Fest is simple: games that already had interest are continuing to scale it, but you’re seeing less of the ‘Next Fest demo hit out of nowhere’. That concept may - or may not - have existed when there were fewer games in NF. But at 3,500+ games, the fractalization of attention is real.

Next, let’s take a look at GDCo’s wishlist increase rankings during Feb’s Next Fest (above). You’ll see a lot of overlap (50%+) with the Top 10 from Valve, but some different titles: for example, the Dynasty Warriors-inspired The Awakener: Battle Tendency (#3) seems to have focused interest from China.

Also notable in here: Diablo-y open-world isometric ARPG Darkhaven (#7) as ‘build your own data center’ automation game Data Center (#8), previously GDCo-covered airship survival title Guardians Of The Wild Sky (#9), and monster tamer x shooter (!) Voiding Bound (#10).

Above are the rest of the Top 30, according to us, and there’s a lot of super interesting titles in there. Examples? Capcom’s slightly enigmatic Pragmata (#12), one of the few very high-budget titles to enter Next Fest, as well as hand-drawn 2D adventure The Eternal Life Of Goldman (#21) & Disco Elysium spiritual sequel Zero Parades (#22).

For further visualization (thx Michael Chan for help!) we again have a handy chart based on the Top 5 Steam tags for the Top 15 ‘new wishlists’ games:

It’s an interesting mix, this time out. We’d highlight Base Building as a strongly shared tag, as well as Open World Survival Craft. But there are also strong games in sharply different genres, such as the Jagged Alliance-like turn-based tactics game Warhounds, and that automation game Data Center. (And Marathon, come to that.)

Oh, and a couple of titles above that we didn’t mention: Romestead is a co-op pixel art survival crafter about rebuilding civilization (interesting angle!), and Atmosfar is a ‘floating island’ survival crafter with more spaceship-adjacent vibes. And Armatus is a third-person roguelite shooter with a fast pace and pretty sweet visuals.

Next let’s come to concurrents. Here’s the Top 20 demos by top CCU during Next Fest, minus Marathon. (Because its 143k CCU would have royally screwed up the chart axes.) We saw three games (inc. Marathon) get >10k CCU, and seven get >5K CCU - all of which we’ve discussed already, except anime hero shooter Fate Trigger.

Oh, and the above chart is an opportunity to discuss my favorite-named demo of Next Fest - Everything Is Crab (2,600 CCU), a really fun-looking ‘evolve or die’ roguelite: “It's Spore meets Modern Roguelites”, apparently, which we really enjoy as a pitch.

Finally, we’ll do the ‘trends’ thing. With regard to number of games, at >3,500 demos, the Feb. 2026 Next Fest is 19% up on October’s, and 51% up on last Feb’s Next Fest:

We try to capture demo counts after Valve kicks out ineligible demos, btw.

It’s actually a pretty smooth upwards climb of the chart excepting Oct. 2024, which we’re starting to wonder we might have grabbed counts on too early. (Or everyone got overexcited about?)

Secondly, we used Steam follower increase to look at how well certain percentages of games have been doing over the latest 6 Next Fests - if you’re in the Top 1%, Top 10%, etc. Results this time show continued % degradation as the # of demos goes up:

This logically follows, due to volume, but: the top 5% of Next Fest entrants this time got ~350 Steam followers (probably ~7,000 wishlists), down from ~520 (~10k wishlists?) a year ago. The median game featured in this Next Fest? It added 11 followers and perhaps 200 wishlists…

And here’s stats from a new GDCo Pro feature tracking game engine/tech data, thanks to some SteamDB-originated file manifest sampling tech. (Reminder: sponsor xPaw on Github if you love his work, as we do.) Here’s the Next Fest engine breakdown:

What we’re seeing here in the 3,500 Next Fest games is 52.2% Unity engine titles, 17.9% Unreal, and 9% Godot, with unidentifiable engines at 12.4%. (With RPGMaker, PyGame, RenPy & more at much lower percentages - it’s a three horse race nowadays.)

Compared to all Steam games we scanned in 2025, there’s more Unity and Godot, and less Unreal. But this is more about the make-up of smaller studios entering Next Fest than a major change in the Unity vs. Unreal market share. (Godot is def. on the way up, though.) We’ll do a big multi-year engine comparison article shortly…

Anyhow, that’s all the Next Fest analysis we’ve got. Reminder: here’s the full raw GDCo data (Google Drive doc). And as a bonus, we recommend checking out Borys Trienin’s Feb. Next Fest analysis (57x slides!) done for rcp Games BI - lots more interesting views in there. 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.]