Who 'won' June 2026's Steam Next Fest?
Also: the debut of the GameDiscoverCo Show, plus lots of game discovery news.
[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 are back, with lots going on: there’s a comprehensive look at Steam Next Fest’s diffuse results & an announce on a new audiovisual addition to GDCo. And don’t forget GDCo’s Scrappy Game Jam on Itch.io, starting in a few hours. (We have cash & GDCo subscription prizes for making baseball mascot mini-games, for funsies…)
Before we start, breaking news: Valve’s Steam Machine is officially pre-orderable via random lottery, and it’s $1,049 (512GB) and $1,349 (2TB) in the U.S. (And +$75 with a Steam controller.) It’s a gorgeous 6-inch cube PC with SteamOS 3 & a custom AMD chipset, but it’s as expensive as we feared. (It’ll sell out now, but not scale massively?)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: EGS gets feature aggro…
Let’s get going with a whole bunch of game discovery & platform news, starting with the following:
Epic Games Store on PC is making a concerted effort to bridge the game with Steam on platform features, with its upcoming feature list (above) including a host of things: “Player profiles and avatars… written reviews… universal Controller support.. spec benchmarking… third party communities & patch notes” - and lots more.
Chirag Vadhia was kind enough to do the math(s) on what an Xbox spinoff from Microsoft could mean, suggesting a valuation range of $35 billion (bear) to $66 billion (bull) for the current business & concluding: “Microsoft most likely keeps Xbox, fixes the margin & never sells the business, because keeping is what Microsoft does.”
Doubleclicking on the Steam Machine, The Verge’s in-depth review is one of the handiest, saying: “It’s the best attempt I’ve seen at a PC that actually fits into a living room, and far better than anything I could build from parts”, but warns on “lingering friction” that is non-console like to get the best AAA game performance, etc.
One more thing on price & supply: Sean Hollister at The Verge notes that “Valve explains that it’s not subsidizing the Steam Machine because of its ‘beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built’” and also: “Valve tells us it was only able to secure around two-thirds of its planned stockpile.” (It might look $$, but so will everything else?)
When we talk about ‘record catalog revenue’ for PC/console games (at lower price per unit, obv!), Capcom is a prime example: Devil May Cry 5 sold 2.1m copies in its first fiscal year (2019) and has now sold 12.9m units, for example (!). And Resident Evil 4 started with 3.7m units in 2023 and is at 13.6m now. (Long! Tail!)
As governments continue to express concern over under-18 Internet/game users, Roblox has rolled out its Roblox Kids & Roblox Select accounts globally, which “introduces additional reviews for games available to users younger than 16”, with game context & maturity checks, and all chat turned off for under-9s as default.
Microlinks: this player survey of the top PS5 games of H1 2026 has multi-platform games populating the Top 3 (Res Evil Requiem, 007 First Light, Pragmata); the CEO of CI Games says that “Our projection is Lords of the Fallen 2 making around 50% sales on PC. We’re big console supporters but PC dominance is the reality.”
Stream Hatchet put out an interesting piece on Dead By Daylight’s streaming strength over the last 10 years, revealing “roughly 75-80% of the game’s viewership on any given day comes from Twitch”, higher than others, and that the Jason Voorhees reveal hit “2.1m hours watched at an average viewership of 89k” on June 16th alone.
There’s been a notable rewrite of the ‘hosting third-party Steam sales’ & sales overview page on Steamworks: a) no ‘adhoc’ sale pages & banner cross-promo (eek!) for dev, publisher & franchise sales created after July 9th (you still get yearly ones - the revamped publisher page is for adhoc offers) b) “discounted offers should be presented at the top of the page” - no up-top wishlist mining, folks…
Indie publisher Polden are continuing to be the squeaky wheel in ‘experimental market testing’ for Steam, explaining: “We’ll sign [Aliens Took My Stuff] for publishing if it reaches 50,000 wishlists”, and saying so far: “Creating the trailer cost, I think, around $3k, and we paid $5k to influencers.” (How far will this go? Is it… good?)
Microlinks: May’s top-grossing (on-platform!) mobile games include Honor Of Kings, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match & Gossip Harbor; an editorial asks why not all SGF games had a Discord & extra media assets set up; Xbox has rolled out a new label for console exclusive games, visible on your Xbox Series dashboard.
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Who ‘won’ June 2026’s Steam Next Fest?
Concluding yesterday, Steam’s June 2026 Next Fest once again showcased a host of upcoming PC game demos - over 4,300 of them, in fact, a record. So time for another deep-dive, following ones in Feb. 2026, Oct. 2025, June 2025, Feb. 2025, Oct. 2024, June 2024, February 2024, Oct. 2023, June 2023, and February 2023.
The format of Next Fest was pretty darn similar to the last one, by the way. An ‘exploration mode’ toggle at the top of the page - making it clear some of the picks were randomized* until Wednesday - was the only notable difference. (*Even before Wed, a chunk of the page is non-randomized, btw, inc. recommended tags & discovery queue.)
We track a host of info about all NF demos, inc. all-time high CCUs and follower and estimated wishlist increases, via our giant June 2026 Next Fest spreadsheet (Google Drive doc), But to start, Steam handily lists the Top 50 Next Fest demos by unique player, and the Top 10 is above. So let’s have a look at some themes:
Dark fantasy, gritty visuals & co-op seem to be key: in depth co-op games like Souls-like dungeon extraction title Mistfall Hunter (#4) and cursed jungle action-er The Mound: Omen Of Cthlhu (#8) are creepy, good-looking and show what you can do with non-AAAA resources. (Quite a lot, it turns out.)
But there’s still room for more ‘casual’ co-op standouts: the Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes-ish high-concept defusal game Bombanana! (#1) is the big example. And already hot co-op offroader Over The Hill (#5) also leans relaxing,
There’s still room for singleplayer in the mix, though: there’s multiple standouts in here - including PVKK-inspired heavy weapons sim Iron Nest (#2), 'you’re playing in a MMO but it’s singleplayer’ ARPG Echoes Of Aincrad (#3), and Papers Please/Quarantine Zone-like XenoFeels (#9) that rock the singleplayer.
There’s also some straight-out wildcards, like Command & Conquer-y isometric real-time strategy game Dust Front RTS (#6), Titanfall-y 6 vs. 6 traversal shooter Empulse (#6) and Diablo-ish Korean MMO Embers Of The Uncrowned (#10). It’s a little bit all over the place…
Thus: the top games here are effectively unsummarizable as one big trend. Why? Because there’s no longer a monoculture*. We all have different media to tell us about each game, and each of these titles is desired by a different ‘filter bubble’ of players.
[*Music writer Joe Muggs has just been talking about this concept as the monoculture fractures: “[Oldskool music writers]… were always looking out for the new rock’n’roll, the next punk, the next hip hop, and dispirited and pessimistic when they couldn’t spot it.”]
Next, here’s GDCo’s rough Top 10 estimates of new wishlists during Next Fest. (These are underestimated in places, due to high ‘follower to wishlist’ rates, but indicative). And we match 8 of the top 10 ‘top unique player’ games: promising Souls-like sequel Mortal Shell II and quaint electronics repair shop sim ReStory are the sole additions.
The rest of the Top 30 by est. wishlist increase are a plethora of genres & game styles:
These include body-swapping robot co-op extraction (Grain Rot, #12), giant puzzle adventure (Order Of The Sinking Star, #15), Beyblade-y battletops sim (!) Slayblade (#22), cozy first-person job sim (Cat Mail. Co, #23), and a host of others.
For further visualization (thx as always Michael Chan for help), the ‘Top 5 Steam’ tags chart for the Top 15 ‘most new wishlists’ games is here:
Tags in common? We see a whole cluster of both co-op and ‘online co-op’, alongside Souls-like and ‘dark fantasy’. But as we discussed above, a lot of these games are pretty.. different…
Lastly for game-specific analysis, here’s games by the highest CCU (concurrent Steam users) during the event - although the Bombanana! demo surged to a possibly sketchy 40k CCU just after the period we were tracking it. These are largely the titles we already talked about, with longer playtime co-op games doing particularly well…
Finally, we’ll do the ‘trends’ thing, and Next Fest game numbers are going up up up - June 2026, at 4,382 demos, is 66% more than the 2,645 demos in June 2025’s Next Fest:
This means that while we’re guessing total game demo plays were up YoY, it’s tough to do as well as games used to, if you’re in the top 10% of games in Next Fest - because duh, there’s lots more games. Here’s our math(s) on that:
You can see that compared to last year, a game in the top 10% of all Steam Next Fest titles added +121 followers (and probably ~3k wishlists?), down about 25% from the +163 followers last June. There’s similar results for top 1%-ers: down ~25% from +1,759 followers (June 2025) to +1,330 followers (June 2026.)
Oh, and two bonus pieces of data. First, we scanned almost every Next Fest demo for engine. And across all games, no matter what budget, it’s open-source Godot which is gaining (up from 9.2% to 12.6%) for this Fest, with Unity & Unreal both dipping a tad:
Also: the number of Next Fest demos that have Valve’s AI content disclosure option enabled went from 750 (21.2%) in the February 2026 to 1,163 (26.5%) in June 2026, trending up. (That broad tickbox could cover a multitude of usages, of course…)
ANNOUNCE: the GameDiscoverCo Show is here..
At the GameDiscoverCo offsite a few weeks ago in Stockholm, one of my co-workers gave me a reasonable challenge: “Since we talk constantly about how (audio)visual media is the main way people find games online, why is GameDiscoverCo a 100% text based service?”
To which I said: fair point. And that’s why we’re here to debut The GameDiscoverCo Show, a weekly video/podcast about some of the biggest game discovery stories of the week. And it’s hosted by myself - Simon Carless - and, in quite a coup (if you ask me!) Polygon co-founder and Post Games/The Besties co-host Chris Plante.
As I say in the intro, I’ve known Chris for a long time, and my chat with him for Post Games reminded me of his boundless enthusiasm and knowledge for the space. For context, we’re planning this as a ‘let’s talk focused game discovery news’ duo-cast, rather than a ‘let’s bring on lots of guests’ schedule-fest, and we truly hope you like it.
The pilot episode - in which we talk about Summer Game Fest & its discovery ramifications for devs, as well as GTA VI's release, Epic's State Of Unreal showcase and UK social media-related legislation that may affect games - is available on our YouTube channel (in video!) & on Spotify, Apple Music & elsewhere (audio!) Enjoy…
[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.]