A 50-item checklist for Steam Next Fest

This covers the whole chain, from registration to what comes after the fest, and most of the items are things people end up learning during fest week itself. 50 of them again.

REGISTRATION AND ELIGIBILITY

1. To be able to register you have to have entered a release date in Steamworks that falls after the fest. With no date, or a date before the fest, the registration option never appears on the screen at all
2. Enter the date and refresh the page, and the fest's box shows up under Marketing and Tools. Registering is a five-minute job
3. Your page now has to be approved for the Next Fest invitation
4. Register even if you are not sure you are going into SNF. You can withdraw at any point before the fest starts and there is no penalty for it
5. The registration deadline is about a month and a half before the fest. If you miss it, your page has to be public and you have to write a separate appeal to Steamworks. They usually accept it if you appeal within the first 10 days
6. Registering is not attending. To attend, both your page and your demo have to be public on the day the fest opens
7. You get one shot: a game can only take part in a single fest. If you went into February, June and October are closed to you
8. The game must not have released by the time the fest ends, and early access counts as a release. The fest starts Monday at 10:00 PDT and runs for a week
9. Always go into the SNF immediately before your game's release, and do go into one

THE CALENDAR

10. Open your page at least 6 months before the fest
11. Ship the first version of the demo 3 months before the fest. This is the highest-earning item on the list, because it means you walk into the fest with a demo that is already ready
12. Publish the demo's big update right before the fest. That is a separate marketing beat and a good way to show up on the News & Updates page
13. Send the demo build for review two to three weeks before the fest at the latest. Any later than that and you have lost the marketing before you started, unless you are sitting on a hyper-viral game
14. Assume your build will be rejected. One team sent theirs four weeks out, got rejected three times, and only got approved with a week to go. Simple mistakes: the file not being live on the default branch, the Mac build uploaded instead of the Windows one, the exe left in a subfolder
15. Release the game one to three months after the fest. The 2 weeks right after the fest are the most crowded. If you are six months out, just go into the next fest instead

INSIDE THE DEMO

16. A demo is not a playtest. A demo that goes into the fest has to be one or two months from release, with the big bugs cleared and the gameplay loop solved
17. Do not put an early alpha or for testing purposes warning at the start of the demo. Let the player tell you the game is not good if it comes to that; you do not need to apologise up front
18. If you go into the fest with a build that has no main menu and no settings screen you will not get a satisfying result, and it shortens your median time
19. Keep onboarding short. Do not open with a long cinematic, a studio logo and a long tutorial. It stretches the median time for no reason and misleads you
20. Give the demo a clear ending. Finish it around 25-30 minutes and make sure a screen pointing at the wishlist comes up there
21. More than 80% of the people who play should get past ten minutes. 85% to 90% means a good demo, under 80% means you need to rethink the demo from the start. Under 60% and it is worth looking over the game as a whole
22. The algorithm does not look at demo length; fifteen minutes and three hours are the same to it. The length is your own quality signal. Track the median play time in Steamworks and aim for the 30 to 90 minute band
23. Give at most 25% of your game in the demo. A player who has spent too long or tasted every feature will say I have played this and not come back for the sale, unless you are in a genre that promises deep content
24. Lock the content you did not put in the demo at the file level. Locked content sitting inside the build gets opened by someone on day one. Do not see your game on FitGirl or RazoR before it releases
25. Show the content that is not in the demo from inside the game. Locked mode buttons and an unlocks in the full version label generally work
26. Collect feedback in one channel. Put a button in the Steam forum, on YouTube and inside the game that all point to the same place
27. When you tabulate the feedback that comes in, the most important column is how many times it repeats. If people are saying the same thing without seeing each other's comments, that is where the real problem is

THE DEMO LAUNCH AND THE STORE PAGE

28. Before the demo, aim for at least 5,000 wishlists if you can, especially for games that do not suit social media and have a hard time collecting wishlists
29. Within the 14 days after the demo goes live you can send a demo is out email to everyone who wishlisted. It is one-time only, so pick the date accordingly
30. Email 1,000-plus content creators the same week. Your target is New & Trending Free, and the threshold people talk about for getting on that list is 100-plus CCU over a 30-day window
31. Around 70% of wishlists come from window shoppers who never play the demo. If three people wishlist, one of those three plays the demo
32. So the page is looked at more than the demo is. The capsule does not just have to be good, it has to be good enough to stop a scroll
33. Localise the page; English is only a third of Steam. Your first target is the biggest 10 languages, in order: English, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Polish and Korean
34. Use all 20 tags. That is the thing that gets you onto the genre tabs on the fest page
35. Make a new trailer for the fest and put the gameplay right at the front. The trailer plays on a TV and the time the player gives you is 4 seconds

BEFORE YOU GO IN

36. If you are going into the fest with under 2,000 wishlists, lower your expectations. In a table of 208 games, everyone who went in under 1,000 stayed in the bottom tier and not one of them climbed
37. The relationship between the wishlists you go in with and the band you come out in is harsh. The median for going in under 1,000 earns 462, going in with 10,000 earns 1,500, going in with 100,000 earns 23,000. I went in with Metal Thunder on 300 wishlists and earned 3,000, and at the time that was the top 10%; today it is barely the upper end of the middle segment
38. If you are sure the game is good but you could not find time for the marketing, do not go into the fest. Withdraw and get ready for the next one. The fest is the last stop before release; after it there is no marketing beat left with this much leverage for a demo
39. Write to content creators at least three weeks in advance. In the week or two before the fest they are getting 10 to 100 emails a day
40. Give them a release state override key from a separate branch so they can see the fest update early, record ahead of time and schedule it to land on the fest
41. Do not get too hung up on the press preview. 10 to 12 games get picked for it and those are games going in with 50k wishlists anyway. The press does not walk around in there; you will still be the one sending the email

FEST WEEK

42. The first 48 hours are random, everyone gets baseline impressions. From the third day Steam switches to personalised recommendation and your fate is decided that day
43. There are two things the algorithm looks at: the wishlist rate you earn during the fest, and your conversion rates. Impression to visit, visit to wishlist and to playing the demo
44. So pile all your marketing into the first two days. The algorithm makes its decision by looking at those two days
45. The livestream slot no longer brings visibility; that boost was removed in October 2024. Spend the time you were going to give it on content creators instead
46. Do not push a big update during the fest. Do not touch the save system or the core systems at all. The cost of breaking the demo is bigger than anything you stand to gain
47. While the fest is live, check in Steamworks which genre tabs you are showing up on. If you are appearing on one or two tabs you have a serious tag problem, and the number of tabs converts directly into impressions

AFTER THE FEST

48. Diagnose the result from three places. If your impressions are low the problem is in the tags; if impressions are good but visits and wishlists are low the problem is the page; if demo downloads are high but wishlists are low the problem is the demo
49. Do not release right after the fest. Up to 100 games a day come out in those days and nearly all of them are competing for the same lists. There is also no such thing as momentum carried over from SNF; the conversion rate of games released in the week after the fest does not come out much different from any other week
50. Leave the demo up after the fest. The large majority of players put it in their library and play it later