I just left a Zoom call for Valve’s 3-times-a-year pre-Next-Fest Q&A. It is a great service Valve does to support developers before before the big show (Next Fest starts in October 9th) and I would recommend you attend them if you can.
I have been to just about every one of these Steam Next Fest (SNF) Q&As and the same questions keep getting asked so I thought I would just write them out here as a reference. Valve does a great job at being accommodating with their answers during these calls because they are running the platform but I can be a bit more direct than they can. So I am adding my answers to give additional context and more judgement. I will clearly state what are my answers VS those that come from valve.
Questions 0: When should I do Steam Next Fest?
You should always do the last Steam Next Fest before you launch your game. This is because visibility on SNF scales with the number of wishlists you have going into it. Also, you want your demo to be as bulletproof as possible. Do not debut your demo during Steam Next Fest. Instead you should run beta tests, play tests, and enter many other festivals (which you can find on my website here howtomarketagame.com/festivals).
Think of SNF as a strategic resource where you are guaranteed a spot. Therefore, you know you can get in so there is no risk when you drop out to further polish your game.
Questions 1: Variations of “Our game isn’t quite ready should we drop out?”
These questions all come in the form of something like this
- “Can I update my demo after it gets approved?”
- “Can I hide my demo from the press preview event because our demo isn’t ready for them?”
- “What is the last day I can pull out of Steam Next Fest because I am not sure our demo will be ready”
MY ANSWER: If you are asking these questions, just drop out of SNF because your game isn’t ready. It just isn’t. Join the next one which is in February.
Questions 2: Can I get featuring in the official Valve SNF sizzle reel Video?
Official answer from Valve (paraphrased): The editorial team has picked the games that will be in the October 2023 SNF promotional materials and if you got an email from them, your game is in. If no email, you are not featured.
Question 3: (A mix of #1 and #2): We were invited by Valve to be featured in the SNF promotional material but our demo isn’t ready, what is the last date we can drop out? If we join a later SNF, will we be featured?
Valve Answer (Paraphrased): You can drop out but if you reenter into a later SNF, you are not guaranteed featuring in the editorial promotional videos. Your game will be judged all over again along side the other games in that future SNF.
MY ANSWER: Drop out and fix your demo and reenter the next SNF. I have surveyed hundreds of games that appeared in SNF and the special featuring in the SNF promotional material doesn’t actually translate into significant traffic increase. The bigger impact on your visibility is how many wishlists and how much wishlist velocity (more about this in a bit) that you get in the 2 weeks before SNF.
I say this because I think the risk of releasing a buggy, confusing, poorly playtested demo that gamers hate is higher than the benefit offered by this promo featuring.
Seriously, this featuring doesn’t give you that much of a boost. Consider it a nice endorsement that you are doing something good (pat yourself on the back) but don’t expect it to do much more than that. Developers spend too much emotional energy worrying about this Valve promotional featuring. You should spend more emotional energy in playtesting your demo, getting feedback from gamers and fixing your demo. See my blog post here on how to playtest
So if your demo isn’t ready, pull your game from SNF, collect more wishlists, playtest, improve your demo, and enter the last one before you launch. You will be so much more confident.
Question 4: Do I have to be live during my Streaming sessions?
MY ANSWER: You do not. You can if you want to just because it can be fun, but if the thought of doing that scares you, then just pre record it and run a constantly looping stream. Valve is not checking to make sure you are actually live (they have more important things to do) they just encourage you to do that because that leads to a fun live atmosphere.
Question 5: Should I stream?
MY ANSWER: YES! You should definitely have a stream running and opt into the two 1-hour featuring spots. It doesn’t really matter what you put in your stream, just do it. It is important to stream because during your enhanced visibility featuring, your game is displayed on a widget on the front page of SNF.
Games get so much visibility for doing that. So you should post some video (it doesn’t have to be live) and you should definitely pick 2 featured times.
Also you should use robostreamer to do your streaming.
Question 6: When should I stream?
MY ANSWER: Pick two times that have very few other games Streaming.
Here is the trade off: should you pick a time that you know will have a lot of steam users online but crowded with other developers streaming their games (like right when the festival starts) OR should I pick a time when there are not as many viewers (2AM Pacific Standard Time) but almost no developer competition?
After seeing a bunch of developers post their numbers, I have settled on the strategy that it is always better to pick the less crowded times. The Steam widget really only features 4 games at a time without scrolling. If you are not in that top 4, you get almost no visibility boost. Therefore it is a fair trade to have less overall visibility but no competition.
So pick your two featured hours in the middle of the night USA time. And remember you don’t have to be live. You should really just have your stream running 24 hours a day during the whole festival.
Question 7: When should my livestream event visibility start?
You can start the Stream before Steam Next Fest even starts. In fact I recommend that you start it early.
The “concurrent viewer” count algorithm is always fuzzy and the Steam seems to use a rolling average to calculate it. Everyone else in Steam Next Fest starts their stream the moment it starts and their concurrent viewer count starts at 0 and takes a few hours to start getting higher.
If you, on the other hand, start a day or 2 earlier, you start Steam Next Fest with a lot more concurrent viewers. It isn’t going to make a huge difference but there are a few streaming widgets that rank the streams based on concurrent viewers. You want to be as high up there as possible.
Question 8: Can you confirm unequivocally that each game can only be in one Steam Next Fest forever
Valve: Yes
MY ANSWER: The Valve rep mentioned that there were a couple games that were in SNF 2021 and they are grandfathered in because that 1-and-done rule wasn’t in place back then. But there aren’t that many left so this is a very slim case.
These old grandfathered in games always turn game developers into conspiracy theorists who are thinking someone is pulling some scam. Relax, focus on your game. You have more important things to do.
Question 9: Should I remove my Demo after the festival?
Valve Answer (paraphrased): <they didn’t actually have a clear answer because it is a big mystery>
MY ANSWER: I think you should keep it up at least 2 weeks after SNF. Many streamers cannot get to all the games they want to and you don’t want to miss out on this bonus traffic.
I did do a survey about wishlists 2 weeks after and there was actually a teeny tiny bit of evidence that pulling your demo right at the end boosted wishlists. But it was so tiny and I don’t have enough data that I don’t think it is statistically significant. You can read my post about whether you should pull your demo here (look for the section titled Post wishlist slump)
Tip 9: Can games that are in EA participate in Steam Next Fest?
Valve Answer: NO! (they didn’t shout, I just did that for emphasis)
Chris Analysis: Your launch into EA is your launch. DO NOT DO EA LIGHTLY. Early Access is not a “try it out” move it is a full on game launch. Be careful with EA!
Once your game can be purchased by the general public, your options and actions you can take are locked down.
I will be writing more about it soon.
Bonus Questions nobody asks but they should ask, so I asked them
Chris Question: In past Steam Next Festivals, the featuring tabs would sometimes disappear. For instance “Most Played Demos” was missing the last 3 days. What’s up with that?
Valve Answer (Paraphrased): We sometimes take away and change widgets during the festival if the widget no longer seems relevant. The speaker specifically said that “Most Played Demos” was basically the exact same as “Trending Games” so they didn’t want to confuse shoppers and just removed the “Most Played Demos” tab.
We (Valve) will probably do that again if something like that happens in the upcoming SNF.
Chris analysis: It makes sense. So don’t get all conspiratorial when you see the tab disappear this month during it. Just ignore it.
Chris Question: Can Steam Next Feat trigger Discovery Queue (DQ) Visibility if you do well?
Valve Answer: Not really.
Chris analysis: The Valve representative hosting the call did say they don’t work on the DQ specifically so they don’t know, but was pretty sure it doesn’t. They also said that Valve doesn’t consider “Traffic” aka visits a good indicator of popularity. Only wishlists and purchases are good enough for them to take notice.
Discovery Queue is an underrated, but potent, but mysterious widget on Steam. I have an upcoming blog post on this matter but I am trying to figure out how it works.
My thought is that SNF doesn’t wake up the Discovery Queue for your game because it is technically internal traffic, and because so many other games in SNF are also getting so much traffic that you are not getting enough to stand out and be worthy of the DQ.
Chris Question: Will there be badges or other incentives to encourage players to play your demo.
Valve Answer (paraphrased): No
Chris analysis: Good! There was a debacle years ago where they gave badges after playing x number of demos and the player base created bots to play every single demo in SNF for 1 second and it screwed up everyone’s numbers.
Nice to hear they learned their lesson.
Chris Unanswerable Question: Is 20,000 wishlists in the 2 weeks the new standard for getting onto Trending Games?
Nobody can answer this question because we don’t know, so I am writing it down so I can find out when SNF opens in October…
In question #3 I mentioned “wishlist velocity.” In previous SNF there was a tab called “Trending games” or “Popular Upcoming.” We theorize that the algorithm looks at how many wishlists every SNF game earns in the 2 weeks leading up to the festival and ranks them. So basically you were competing against all the other games and the 12 games with the highest velocity got on the front page and earned more wishlists than Santa.
In all the previous SNF’s if you could generate 3,000 – 4,000 wishlists in the previous 2 weeks you were pretty likely to end up on that front page. HOWEVER, in the June 2023 SNF the top 12 games were earning 20,000 wishlists in a 2 week period. The question is, is 20K the new standard since marketers are getting so good at promoting their game on Steam? OR was that just a blip in June because the E3-like shows were the weeks before SNF and that caused a lot of wishlist velocity.
This is my #1 question leading into the SNF show and I am super excited to find out and will definitely report on this.