When the 2020 pandemic hit and game conferences and trade shows went online only, developers quickly learned that online-only festivals became one of the most potent forms of marketing. Coincidentally, the timing of online-only festivals was perfect because Valve JUST added the festival sales page technology in 2019.
Online Festivals include official Valve-run events like Steam Next Fest. It also includes Festivals organized by 3rd parties like The Indie Premier which kicked off last week. To get into these festivals you apply, and if the organizers liked your game, they would post your game on the festival page and then you get 100s, potentially 1000s of wishlists.
It was such a potent marketing tactic that the HTMAG community started tracking festival applications. You can see festivals accepting new games here: howtomarketagame.com/festivals.
We are now 6 years from the birth of Online Festivals. How is it going?
The history of Steam festivals
I used my own Festival Tracker as well as some deep google searching to try and find every single 3rd-party festival. Then I scraped what games were featured in them. Overall I found 470 total virtual 3rd-party festivals.
Here is a graph of all of theme festivals per month since Valve rolled out the Steam festival showcase feature:
Couple of notes
- This is ONLY 3rd-party festivals. This does NOT include Valve-run festivals such as Steam Next Fest it does NOT include themed festivals like the Cyberpunk Theme Sale that is running right now.
- It also doesn’t include Publisher-run sales or Franchise sales that get sales pages. Sometimes publishers theme and name their franchise sales to look like festivals. For instance here is Team 17 Halloween Sale. That’s a publisher self promo there.
- I know I missed some festivals. I tried my best to go back and locate as many as I could.
- Some festivals pull their pages or continue to update the URL year over year so past participant lists are lost to time. For example PC Gaming show 2025 just hangs. The 2026 version is still live though.
Because I scraped the games that appeared in each festival I can see how many games get featured in a festival every month.
That is a total of 31,285 unique games that have been in a festival since 2020. But remember, there were 100,506 total games across all of Steam released since 2020 (data source: vginsights).
So just over 31% of all games released since 2020 have appeared in at least one festival. That doesn’t even include Steam Next Fest.
How many festivals can you get into?
Using the data I can parse out how many festivals every game took part in. Some did well, some did VERY WELL.
Look at this hockey stick!
Basically there are 500 or so games that get into SO MANY FESTIVALS. Then there is a long diminishing tail of games that only get into 1-5.
| Metric | Festivals / game |
| Average | 2.91 |
| 30th percentile | 1 |
| Median | 2 |
| 70th percentile | 3 |
| 90th percentile | 6 |
| 95th percentile | 10 |
Everything on Steam is a hockey stick!
We complain a lot about how algorithms favor some games and ignore others that is the source for Steam inequality. But these are hand-curated festivals not by Valve but by organizations and volunteers just trying to spread the word of the games they love. Human beings are there to decide which game gets in and which one gets the rejection letter.
Survivorship Bias Note: This average data is just from games that appeared in at least ONE festival. Remember there were 31,285 unique games but there were 100,506 total games released on Steam since January 2020 (data source vginsights).
Best festival games
What are the top 1% of festival friendly games? Here are the top 25 with their genre and reviews
| Rank | Game | Festival Appearances | Genre | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Wandering Village | 59 | Cozy City Builder | 8,385 |
| 2 | Tavern Talk | 55 | Narrative | 1,754 |
| 3 | Dorfromantik | 51 | Cozy City Builder | 29,508 |
| 4 | Dungeon Clawler | 47 | Roguelite | 3,926 |
| 5 | 13Z: The Zodiac Trials | 43 | Action Roguelike | (not released) 7,067 Followers |
| 6 | TerraScape | 42 | City Builder | 2,222 |
| 7 | Tiny Bookshop | 41 | Cozy Management | 7,509 |
| 8 | Truckful | 39 | Narrative Driving | (not released) 7199 Followers |
| 9 | Altered Alma | 39 | Metroidvania | (not released) 9,491 Followers |
| 10 | Solarpunk | 38 | Open World Survival Craft | 4,040 |
| 11 | Fishbowl | 36 | Narrative | 175 |
| 12 | OPUS: Prism Peak | 35 | Narrative | 1178 |
| 13 | Airborne Empire | 35 | City Builder | 907 |
| 14 | Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut | 35 | Horror Narrative | 33,229 |
| 15 | Sky of Tides | 35 | Narrative | (not released) 2,149 followers |
| 16 | Tales of Seikyu | 35 | Farming Life Sim | 2,503 |
| 17 | Lost Twins 2 | 35 | Puzzle Platformer | 53 |
| 18 | Star Birds | 34 | Cozy Base Builder | 3,048 |
| 19 | Danchi Days | 34 | Narrative | (not released) 1,950 |
| 20 | Lou's Lagoon | 33 | Open World Survival Craft | (not released) 8,121 Followers |
| 21 | Back to the Dawn | 33 | RPG | 10,330 |
| 22 | A Tiny Sticker Tale | 33 | Puzzle | 461 |
| 23 | Woodo | 33 | Narrative | (not released) 6,342 Followers |
| 24 | K-pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut | 32 | Narrative | 182 |
| 25 | Die in the Dungeon | 32 | Roguelite | 3,436 |
Notice anything? Most of these games are Cozy, Crafty, Buildy, Management Games, plus a bunch of Narrative ones.
While the most featured games do match some of Steam’s preference they are surprisingly lacking in some very popular genres:
Simulation, Friendslop, Roguelite, and Horror.
Why?
Cozy and Narrative festivals are over represented in festivals. Here is a chart I put together that shows off the general genre of each festival type. "All" means that festival accepts all genres.
Publishers
If you dig into the games with the most festival appearances you will notice they are overwhelmingly dominated by games with publishers. Improved festival appearances is one of those benefits to having a publisher. For a couple reasons.
- A lot of these festivals are organized by publishers. Wholesome games is a publisher
- Publishers are friends with other publishers. So if one publisher is running a festival they might be more willing to accept a game from a friend.
- Brand recognition. There are thousands of entries to these festivals. I am sure that when organizers see a game is published by a familiar name, they know that can mean quality and type of game. Probably more likely to admit.
- Publishers have a dedicated marketing team that has experience filling out festival applications. They know how to sell the game. They also have an extensive list of the previous festivals
So who is the best publisher if you want to get into festivals? No doubt about it: Stray Fawn.
Notice how many of their games are in the most featured ever:
- The Wandering Village (59 fests)
- Dungeon Clawler (47 fests)
- Airborne Empire (35 fests)
They are the absolute masters of getting into festivals. I reached out to the team at Stray Fawn to ask how they do it:
We have a growing list of events in which we participated (and check yearly again), as well as we check all the other sources and lists for new events/festivals. If there's an event we can join (fitting theme), we apply and try to get in. We do it for all the released games where it makes sense.
- Stray Fawn Team
My advice to being like Stray Fawn? Use the history function over at howtomarketagame.com/festivals and plan accordingly.
Exposure doesn’t equal sales
I was aware of pretty much all the games in the top 25 most featured games except for Lost Twins 2. It appeared in over 35 festivals total but only has 53 reviews after releasing last year.
Digging into it, it is a puzzle platformer with a child-like visual style and child protagonists. It looks nice, has great graphics and from the trailer the puzzles look clever, but the genre and visuals are one of the hardest to do well with on Steam. It just isn’t a fit.
This is what I mean when I say that the type of game you pick is the most important decision for your game’s sales potential. Even if you get the best featuring in the world, you can’t beat genre. The limiting factor is not visibility, it is finding a match with the Steam audience.
Advice
You could come away from this article bitter:
“They aren’t running any festivals for the type of game I am making. Everything is wholesome and narrative. When are the real games going to get a festival? Booo.”
-Typical Reddit guy
Just remember, you can just make your own festival. You can just do things.
The Narrative and Wholesome communities were frustrated that they weren't getting visibility and did they didn’t just complain in some discord that nobody will ever read?
NO!
They did something about it. They organized. They emailed and chatted with people making games similar to them. They made friends. They created festivals. They contacted streamers.
You can do that too!
And don't be discouraged if you see that someone already organized a festival in your genre. There can be more than one. It doesn’t matter. Look at how many narrative festivals there are in just the last year.
- LudoNarraCon 2025
- The Story-Rich Showcase
- Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival - https://store.steampowered.com/sale/fallinlovefestival2025
- Story-Rich Megabundle
- Otome Games Celebration
- The Storyteller's Festival 2026
- Curious Odyssey
- Laughs & Smiles Festival
- Choose Wisely Festival 2025
- AdventureX 2025 Event
Do we really need another narrative festival? Probably not. But should that stop you from organizing one? No Way!
As soon as you think there are too many, just subdivide into a deeper niche like romantic narrative games, funny narrative games, adventure games, narrative games where you date inanimate objects with weird sexual energy.
Just. Do. It.
Get inspired by some of these organizations. If you are making a genre that isn’t represented here, go make one. These people rock:
- Strategy games (Tacticon, TurnBasedThursday)
- Wholesome games (Wholesome Games)
- Narrative games (LudoNarraCon)
- Puzzle games (Cerebral Puzzle)
- Rogue (Roguelike Celebration)
Woo-woo strange coincidence
The very first official Steam online festival started on November 20th, 2019 just a month before the first recorded outbreak of COVID-19. The theme of the festival: Remote Play Together. MIND. BLOWN.
This couch banner image should almost be one of those of-their-time images of world events like the KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON posters.
The virus didn't even exist yet, but Valve already anticipated both how we would be playing and how we would be marketing games in the future. This type of foresight of world events is why we pay Valve 30%.
Also, interesting bit of trivia: the very very first festival in the public Valve Database is Test event Ignore Me with URL AdilTestPage referencing Adil Sardar, Senior Software Engineer at Valve.
In that Test page, the first non-Valve game to be featured in a festival? Virgo Versus The Zodiac
Let's tip our hat to Adil for bringing this important feature to life.