Who 'won' June 2025's Steam Next Fest?
We're all winners around here, tho! Also: lots of news, yep.
[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 off on a small vacation for the next few days (yes, it’s summer holidays already in the U.S.) But fear ye not, we’ll still be popping in with various newsletters, if perhaps not quite the monumental size we sometimes birth them at. (Phew.)
Before we start, who remembers Atari’s classic gravity-based arcade machine Lunar Lander? Well, here’s a great thing: “Meccano Martian Mission is an homage to Atari’s 1978 Lunar Lander video game, but entirely electromechanical and made of– you guessed it – Meccano.” Here’s the YouTube video - reminds us of mechanical Pong.
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Game discovery news: Stellar Blade slices up PC!
To start, let’s take a look at some of the notable game discovery & platform news that popped up since last time:
We mentioned this in last Friday’s Plus newsletter, but: Stellar Blade hit 192,000 CCU on Steam (68% Chinese players, btw, and Daniel Camilo has some views on why!) & made it to #2 of all PlayStation-published Steam games (above), way ahead of Ghost Of Tsushima, God Of War & Spider-Man, and behind only Helldivers 2.
The Verge’s Tom Warren thinks that Microsoft’s next-gen consoles are going to be more heavily Windows-associated, based on the ROG Ally handheld UI work: “Instead of buying one Xbox console from Microsoft, what if you could buy Xbox consoles from lots of PC makers without ever having to see the complexity of Windows?”
Via Eurogamer’s report: “Sony quietly removes PC sale restrictions in dozens of countries for four huge PlayStation games… including God of War Ragnarök, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and yes... Helldivers 2.” (This is related to reversing the ‘PSN doesn’t support these countries, so we can’t sell it on Steam’ view.)
Some Switch 2 U.S. launch stats from Circana: “Over 1.1 million units sold during the week ending June 7, 2025 ([excl.] My Nintendo Store)… 79% of US Nintendo Switch 2 buyers also purchased Mario Kart World.” And the Top 3 physical U.S. Switch 2 games? Mario Kart World (duh!), Cyberpunk 2077 (huh!) & Tears of the Kingdom.
PSA from Valve for game devs: “The Steam Summer Sale is coming up quickly! Have you entered your discounts yet? Please aim to get your desired percentages entered this week [in the] Steamworks discounting dashboard.” For background, the sale starts Thursday, June 26th at 10am PT, and runs for two weeks.
Xbox games have never been that collectible in physical format, and it seems that Xbox’s own The Outer Worlds 2 is reflecting that, according to Kotaku: “The Outer Worlds 2 will get a standard disc option on PlayStation 5, but only a code in a box for Xbox Series X owners.” (Also true for Ninja Gaiden 4 & Gears Of War: Reloaded.)
We covered Roblox game Grow A Garden when it ‘only’ peaked at 8.9 million CCU, but its recent weekly event peaked at over 16 million CCU, beating out Fortnite’s all-time high of 14.35 million. (Grow A Garden is hanging between 2 and 3 million CCU when it’s not doing events, which is… not shabby.)
Since we got our Switch 2 console now, a couple of clarifications updating our launch article on the eShop. Firstly: though the Deals page mixes Switch 1 & Switch 2 games freely, the Switch 2 eShop’s Best Sellers chart defaults to Switch 2 games, with a separate tab for Switch 1. (This is a win for Switch 2 exclusives.)
Two more discovery ‘steps forward’ on the Switch 2 eShop: the ‘recent releases’ section has a top section sorted by highest-selling recent games (good!); when you boot the eShop, it flashes up the # of your wishlisted games on sale, briefly.
How big was the Summer Game Fest stream? According to G. Keighley, it was the most watched ever, with 50 million+ livestreams viewed, 3 million+ CCU, and an “89% [year on year] increase in live concurrent viewers on Twitch & YouTube, according to Streamscharts.”
A new Digital Foundry interview on The Witcher 4’s tech demo brings up Xbox Series S (everyone’s least favorite high-end console!) again, with the CDPR folks saying: “I will say that 60 FPS will definitely be extremely challenging on Series S… this is something that we need to figure out.”
There was a complicated ‘consumers x alleged anticompetitive Steam practices’ lawsuit update & luckily GameFile’s Nicole Carpenter is on it : “Steam platform maker Valve… is holding up thousands of arbitration claims by refusing to pay $21 million in fees to an arbitration firm.” (Valve removed forced arbitration in 2024, btw.)
Who ‘won’ June 2025’s Steam Next Fest demos?
If you’re new around here - yes, GameDiscoverCo has been covering Steam Next Fest demo trends for a while. Evidence: here’s our pieces from Feb. 2025, Oct. 2024, June 2024, February 2024, Oct. 2023, June 2023, and February 2023, each looking at trends within each event, which showcases hundreds - or thousands - of PC game demos.
It’s difficult to get an exact demo count, because lots of games drop out late or don’t submit valid demos and have to be culled. But above is our best data for submission growth over time for Next Fest - from ~900 demos (June 2023) to ~1,800 demos (June 2024) to >2,600 demos (June 2025). So yes, game makers are really ‘into’ this festival.
There are a variety of ways to show the top games of Next Fest. And all of them - CCU, followers, Steam’s top 50 by unique players, and GDCo’s wishlist estimates are available in this absolutely giant GDCo Google Drive doc. If you scroll right to the ‘all fest demos’ section, you can see where your game placed!
So let’s start with a look at our Top 30 from a ‘more Steam wishlists during Next Fest’ point of view. These are - disclaimer - a bit low (perhaps 20-40%), because it takes our algorithms a while to catch up. But we still believe the general rankings, and they are:
Some comments on this Top 10? We’d be happy to, and we’d like to note the following:
Stellar Blade launched during Next Fest, so became ineligible: weird - the Next Fest Steamworks page says games have to be “released at any time after the Next Fest edition in which it is participating.” But the Stellar Blade demo was high up Next Fest before it left as the game debuted last week. So it’s #1, on a technicality, haha.
Some unique titles made it in our Top 10 by wishlists: we’re delighted to see “superhero workplace comedy” Dispatch (#3). And creepy ‘is this person a person?’ horror game No, I’m Not A Human (#4) also fared well. Also novel: rhythm brawler Dead As Disco (#8), clever brick-breaking roguelike Ball X Pit (#9), and Patapon spiritual rhythm roguelike sequel Ratatan (#10).
There’s also plenty of room for ‘trad’ (gritty/co-op) titles: less unique - but still super well-done? Titles including ARPG Vindictus: Defying Fate (#2), co-op spaceship/FPS standout Jump Ship (#5), vaguely STALKER-like MMOFPS Pioner (#6), and an ARPG based on the Solo Leveling webtoon megafranchise (#7).
We can also look at the rest of the Top 30 in this view, and there’s a lot of good games to peep in here:
There’s everything from standout pixel 2D games (Mina The Hollower, from Shovel Knight’s devs, and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound from Blasphemous’ devs) through co-op heavy action goodness (Wildgate on the space side, Mimesis on the horror side!) to gorgeous-looking Ubisoft published hack and slash-ers (!) (Morbid Metal.)
That’s most of the Top 15 described, except for shopkeeper adventure Moonlighter 2 and chill survival crafter Voyagers Of Nera. So now we can bring up this nice ‘Top 5 Steam tag overlap’ chart, plotted for us again by AccelByte’s Michael Chan:
We wouldn’t actually say there’s major overarching trends. Which is good, right - lots of different types of games winning the day? At minimum, we’d say: wow, there’s a ton of great games out there to be discovered. (We’d only heard of ~50% of these!)
Next, let’s look at some different views, starting with Next Fest demos by top concurrent users. This is a good way to see what had lots of people playing at once - but is biased towards longer-play titles:
Well, Vindictus is the clear winner in this view, with games like Wildgate (#2) also faring a lot better. This is presumably due to players trying them for long periods of time, leading to overlap and increased CCU compared to short, sharp experiences.
There’s also a few other demos making it into the Top 10 that we didn’t already cover, including ‘massively multiplayer medieval war game’ Anvil Empires (#3), survival crafter Grand Emprise 2 (#7), and F2P soccer game UFL (#8). (All likely had strong playtime.)
Finally, let’s take a look at the Top 20 games by follower increase during Steam Next Fest, which - to be frank - isn’t that different from our wishlist view:
There’s a few well-performing Top 20 titles we haven’t discussed in here, though. These include dinosaur-heavy FPS survival title Ferocious, atmospheric horror adventure Hell Is Us, and survival crafter Lost Rift.
Finally, we wanted to note that Valve themselves just published the top 50 demos by unique player, another great metric. We put it in the full Google Doc too. But for the record, the Top 10 are: “Vindictus, Wildgate, Jump Ship, Mimesis, Dead As Disco, Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, Pioner, No I’m Not A Human, UFL, Starlight Re:Volver.”
So there’s only one new title in Valve’s Top 10 by uniques that we haven’t discussed - Starlight Re:Volver being an anime co-op action roguelite. This is a game that got sampled by lots of players, but didn’t necessarily max out CCUs. (Starlight Re:Volver peaked at <1,000 CCU, for example.)
There’s also some short, sharp, fun games that didn’t make it as high in our other charts, but had lots of unique players. These include ducky top-down extraction shooter Escape From Duckov, silly co-op driving game Backseat Drivers, and catchy slot machine roguelite CloverPit.
One chart to end? The number of Steam followers you get if your game is in a certain rank (Top 1%, Top 10%, Top 50%, etc) of all of the Steam Next Fest demos, over the past five Next Fests:
If you compare a median game to last June’s Next Fest, where there were half as many games, it added a similar amount of followers - around 15, which probably equates to around 300 Steam wishlists (since higher ratios often rule in Next Fests.)
Some of the other metrics are down a bit vs. both June 2024 and February 2025. But there’s still interest out there - if you made the Top 1%, you probably added 30k+ wishlists. (Though the Top 10% only added somewhere around 3k wishlists.)
Talking of ‘lots of choice’? We checked YouTube for one of the top videos for ‘interesting Next Fest demos’, from nocaps (above). And only one of the 10 demos she highlighted - Mina The Hollower - is the same as ANY of the games discussed above.
So that’s when you remember - we talked specifically about ~30 of the 2,600 games in this Next Fest. That’s around 1% of the total Next Fest demos. The amount of choice out there is just… staggering. And that’s still the overall headline, for better or worse.
[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.]