One thing I noticed is when you were discussing how people felt about it, you sounded surprised that someone gained 500ish wishlists and said it exceeded their expectations. I think something important to remember is that it's entirely possible that this person's goal wasn't to see an explosion and make it big. Making something smaller and going through the process of listing it on steam, participating in something like this is an amazing learning opportunity for releasing something else in the future. Or by NOT getting a large amount of wishlists and the extra eyes on their game, they got some really valuable feedback. We all take different paths on our journey and if they're happy with it, it should definitely be celebrated.
I think I'm in this camp. Sure, it'd be great if my game got heaps of wishlists when I put it in next fest, but this is my first Steam game and I'm mostly just treating this as a learning experience of going through the release process for a bigger project. My expectations have been set appropriately for that goal.
I got 303 wishlists on my game. I went in not expecting much because my game was an rpgmaker game and was extremely short, so i was pleasantly surprised. My game is fully released now, i released it a week after nextfest (I was hoping for some feedback but i never got any from players so i released it as-is). It's a free game as well, but i'm very happy that some of the players have gone and bought the soundtrack. It shows i must've done something right, at least with the music.
My game, Symbio got about 500+ wishlists from the previous Steam Fest (from 215 to about 750). After the fest, the average wishlist dropped to just 1 or 2, sometimes 0 wishlist per day. It is no longer a question of whether one should join the Steam Fest. It is probably the only way a new game can achieve visibility on Steam nowadays. 😢
Great video! I was definitely pretty unimpressed with my NextFest experience (in part because of your forge industry results building my expectations lol). Good on you for crunching the numbers, definitely a must watch for newer devs expecting NextFest to chanbe their lives.
Great insight. You bring up the point that others miss, if you're not already winning building following you won't suddenly change it. Unless magically you get propped up to the front page. I tried about 50 demos, some got 2 minutes, some I maxed out. Included are some that were part of one of the Summer Games Fest events, experimental games, to AA titles that were about to release. So the most of the titles were brought to my attention through events, articles in gaming community, TH-cam reviews, and lastly search on Steam event itself which focused on specific genres and tags.
This was the first Next Fest I actually downloaded demos from, but it was only two and one I was planning to buy anyway. With the sheer amount of demos that appear now, Valve probably needs to make a discovery queue specifically for the Fest.
Another factor that I think boosts Next Fest participation is the new publisher dashboard calendar that reminds people about cutoff dates for events. I love that, and think it's a great UI improvement.
Nice video and insights, this kind of aggregation of data from similar level devs is really cool, I would've liked a bit more detail on the form results, genre for example, but still interesting to see.
Industry networking! The real key to success 😎 Coders & artists, biz-dev & social media folks, should pair up, leverage their combined strengths. There are no brownie points for doing everything yourself - only for making the best damn game you can [together]. M- Glad the sickness didn't KO you!
Another great video. Definitely is applicable to my low visibility game (RoadHouse Manager) so really good info here that is hard to come by. Most game dev videos just seem to focus on the monster hits and not these more reasonable / standard lower visibility indie games, which gives unrealistic hopes to game makers like myself! Also: great job on the time stamps. Quality video!
Even 1 person that'd become my big fan is good enough. Heck even a small fan is fine too, at least they'll give me some consideration for my next game. Anything which is not 0 is already better than 0. But I'm fine with 0 because at least I'll release something and learn about the process.
Tbh I would love to look through the Steam demos on next fest. Even with the amount of entries rn. But the act of looking through games is just so annoying, that I barely look through them anymore. :/
10:30 That winner-take-most aspect, what Chris Z calls "Real Steam", that's the issue. Saw that GMTK vid yesterday - even his game, with all his visibility/mktg, was pretty far down on the genre page, much further than any player would likely go, if they weren't already looking for his game, specifically. Would be interesting to see the same analysis for genre-based festivals. The odds should be more in devs' favor there, with players who are already interested in your genre. If your game isn't getting wishlist traction even with visibility, probably best to get some honest feedback, playtesting, etc. Maybe it can be salvaged, maybe it can't, but no amount of gaming the Steam algo/Festival can make players "bite" if they don't like what you're offering 😢
@@DeavtheDev More of a puzzle game than a platformer, but I agree, that's not any better for mktg. I was actually surprised as time went on, as he seemed to mentally shift from "a little experiment" to "let's see if this is commercial". When he said this last ep that he'd contracted a BGM composer & bought capsule art, that clearly [to me] pointed to a context-switch being flipped somewhere. If this was meant to be a serious commercial endeavor, should've gone about it quite differently IMO
@@DeavtheDev He has a great following... of game-devs 😅 And even if all of us also buy/play games, how many are interested in *this* game, specifically? Several game-dev YTers have hit that same quandary, and a few have made vids about it. Devlog & design channels attract devs - players are an overlapping, but not identical, subset 🤷
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't have realistic expectations and think that NextFest will launch their games for them. I haven't event gotten my demo done yet, but I do know that I will want to do a lot more marketing and have my full game as close to done as I can so that I can release a polished representative demo for people to play, then I can take feedback and improve what should be close to done. And while doing all of it, marketing the heck out of it so people can see what I am working on and actually get excited to try it. I honestly don't believe that "A good game will sell itself." Not true. You are competing with so many games that are uploaded to Steam daily. You need to do the work of marketing your game, probably before you even have a Steam page created (though probably not too long), so people can start learning about it and getting excited. Then when you launch your Steam page, start blasting that. Make people aware of it. Create a TH-cam channel and talk about different aspects of your design process. Show of snips and clips of your game. Make people aware of it on multiple platforms. I really do think you can wait a while before you actually launch and you should be playtesting your alpha and beta builds with as many people as you can. Heck, you could probably start a patreon or Ko-Fi and offer that as a reward/incentive to support you, as well as other behind the scenes type things that you don't show your normal viewers. There are so many ways to market, advertise, and even start making a little bit of money before you even launch your game. And I would be willing to bet that if you put in the time and work, not only would you be able to get a decent enough following before you launched on NextFest, but you might even be able to get a publisher deal with a decent company that can help you improve your game and market it better, so that when you do finally release it, it can actually be successful. But it is going to take a lot of work that is not the game dev stuff to get that to happen.
Wait a minute, how fast are you getting these videos done? I thought Develop Brighton was from the 9th of July (today) and the 11th... You already had time to meet Mark and release the video today 😱?
Through pain and suffering, I recorded the A-roll in the morning right before the event, and then edited the video in-between meetings and right after the event, to still go out the same day. Grind never stops. -M
EVERY game is allowed to participate in a Next Fest, but only once, and only before it releases. Generally is advised to participate in the one closest to your game release (as the demo will be most polished)
Ah I see ... Reached the end of the vid now :) lucky fella :) hey I'm glad Ur doing better now btw .... I heard via Thomas on his dev stream the other day. Enjoyyyyn
One thing I noticed is when you were discussing how people felt about it, you sounded surprised that someone gained 500ish wishlists and said it exceeded their expectations. I think something important to remember is that it's entirely possible that this person's goal wasn't to see an explosion and make it big. Making something smaller and going through the process of listing it on steam, participating in something like this is an amazing learning opportunity for releasing something else in the future. Or by NOT getting a large amount of wishlists and the extra eyes on their game, they got some really valuable feedback.
We all take different paths on our journey and if they're happy with it, it should definitely be celebrated.
I think I'm in this camp. Sure, it'd be great if my game got heaps of wishlists when I put it in next fest, but this is my first Steam game and I'm mostly just treating this as a learning experience of going through the release process for a bigger project.
My expectations have been set appropriately for that goal.
@@BarneyCodes Hell yeah, I'm not even at that point yet so many props to you
@@pizzalawyer Thanks so much! You've got this :)
I got 303 wishlists on my game. I went in not expecting much because my game was an rpgmaker game and was extremely short, so i was pleasantly surprised. My game is fully released now, i released it a week after nextfest (I was hoping for some feedback but i never got any from players so i released it as-is).
It's a free game as well, but i'm very happy that some of the players have gone and bought the soundtrack. It shows i must've done something right, at least with the music.
In my experience, I entered farming fest with around 500WL and ended up with around 1.5K WL. It was a banger for me at least.
Themed fest are much, much better imo, and will probably get a dedicated video later on. -M
i think next fest is fine, its free to participate so there is no loss or negative doing it
Only if you already have a playable demo that's up to date. Remember, costs aren't only in cash, they're also in time, motivation, goodwill, etc.
My game, Symbio got about 500+ wishlists from the previous Steam Fest (from 215 to about 750). After the fest, the average wishlist dropped to just 1 or 2, sometimes 0 wishlist per day. It is no longer a question of whether one should join the Steam Fest. It is probably the only way a new game can achieve visibility on Steam nowadays. 😢
Great video! I was definitely pretty unimpressed with my NextFest experience (in part because of your forge industry results building my expectations lol). Good on you for crunching the numbers, definitely a must watch for newer devs expecting NextFest to chanbe their lives.
Great insight. You bring up the point that others miss, if you're not already winning building following you won't suddenly change it. Unless magically you get propped up to the front page. I tried about 50 demos, some got 2 minutes, some I maxed out. Included are some that were part of one of the Summer Games Fest events, experimental games, to AA titles that were about to release. So the most of the titles were brought to my attention through events, articles in gaming community, TH-cam reviews, and lastly search on Steam event itself which focused on specific genres and tags.
But isn't the Summer Fest only for released games?
This was the first Next Fest I actually downloaded demos from, but it was only two and one I was planning to buy anyway.
With the sheer amount of demos that appear now, Valve probably needs to make a discovery queue specifically for the Fest.
Another factor that I think boosts Next Fest participation is the new publisher dashboard calendar that reminds people about cutoff dates for events. I love that, and think it's a great UI improvement.
Nice video and insights, this kind of aggregation of data from similar level devs is really cool, I would've liked a bit more detail on the form results, genre for example, but still interesting to see.
Industry networking! The real key to success 😎 Coders & artists, biz-dev & social media folks, should pair up, leverage their combined strengths. There are no brownie points for doing everything yourself - only for making the best damn game you can [together].
M- Glad the sickness didn't KO you!
Another great video. Definitely is applicable to my low visibility game (RoadHouse Manager) so really good info here that is hard to come by. Most game dev videos just seem to focus on the monster hits and not these more reasonable / standard lower visibility indie games, which gives unrealistic hopes to game makers like myself!
Also: great job on the time stamps. Quality video!
Even 1 person that'd become my big fan is good enough. Heck even a small fan is fine too, at least they'll give me some consideration for my next game. Anything which is not 0 is already better than 0. But I'm fine with 0 because at least I'll release something and learn about the process.
Tbh I would love to look through the Steam demos on next fest. Even with the amount of entries rn. But the act of looking through games is just so annoying, that I barely look through them anymore. :/
10:30 That winner-take-most aspect, what Chris Z calls "Real Steam", that's the issue. Saw that GMTK vid yesterday - even his game, with all his visibility/mktg, was pretty far down on the genre page, much further than any player would likely go, if they weren't already looking for his game, specifically.
Would be interesting to see the same analysis for genre-based festivals. The odds should be more in devs' favor there, with players who are already interested in your genre.
If your game isn't getting wishlist traction even with visibility, probably best to get some honest feedback, playtesting, etc. Maybe it can be salvaged, maybe it can't, but no amount of gaming the Steam algo/Festival can make players "bite" if they don't like what you're offering 😢
To be fair GTMK is making a platformer game which is notoriously bad for marketing and saleability.
@@DeavtheDev More of a puzzle game than a platformer, but I agree, that's not any better for mktg. I was actually surprised as time went on, as he seemed to mentally shift from "a little experiment" to "let's see if this is commercial".
When he said this last ep that he'd contracted a BGM composer & bought capsule art, that clearly [to me] pointed to a context-switch being flipped somewhere. If this was meant to be a serious commercial endeavor, should've gone about it quite differently IMO
@@mandisaw i agree!! He does have a decent following though so that likely could help him out!
@@DeavtheDev He has a great following... of game-devs 😅 And even if all of us also buy/play games, how many are interested in *this* game, specifically? Several game-dev YTers have hit that same quandary, and a few have made vids about it. Devlog & design channels attract devs - players are an overlapping, but not identical, subset 🤷
hopefully im gonna be on the next next festival, hopefully 25 wishlists will come
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't have realistic expectations and think that NextFest will launch their games for them. I haven't event gotten my demo done yet, but I do know that I will want to do a lot more marketing and have my full game as close to done as I can so that I can release a polished representative demo for people to play, then I can take feedback and improve what should be close to done. And while doing all of it, marketing the heck out of it so people can see what I am working on and actually get excited to try it. I honestly don't believe that "A good game will sell itself." Not true. You are competing with so many games that are uploaded to Steam daily. You need to do the work of marketing your game, probably before you even have a Steam page created (though probably not too long), so people can start learning about it and getting excited. Then when you launch your Steam page, start blasting that. Make people aware of it. Create a TH-cam channel and talk about different aspects of your design process. Show of snips and clips of your game. Make people aware of it on multiple platforms. I really do think you can wait a while before you actually launch and you should be playtesting your alpha and beta builds with as many people as you can. Heck, you could probably start a patreon or Ko-Fi and offer that as a reward/incentive to support you, as well as other behind the scenes type things that you don't show your normal viewers.
There are so many ways to market, advertise, and even start making a little bit of money before you even launch your game. And I would be willing to bet that if you put in the time and work, not only would you be able to get a decent enough following before you launched on NextFest, but you might even be able to get a publisher deal with a decent company that can help you improve your game and market it better, so that when you do finally release it, it can actually be successful. But it is going to take a lot of work that is not the game dev stuff to get that to happen.
Dude I'm an artist, but I'm a crappy artist that can't make beautiful arts like others. This made me just a jack of all trade with skills issue.
Wait a minute, how fast are you getting these videos done? I thought Develop Brighton was from the 9th of July (today) and the 11th... You already had time to meet Mark and release the video today 😱?
Through pain and suffering, I recorded the A-roll in the morning right before the event, and then edited the video in-between meetings and right after the event, to still go out the same day.
Grind never stops. -M
@@bitemegames damn, well done 💪 !!!
Are there any rules what kind of games can participate at the Next Fest .... are games with violence or nudity also allowed ?
Probably whatever is allowed normally in Steam, I'd guess. They might have some kind of content-tagging & age-gating system, not sure.
EVERY game is allowed to participate in a Next Fest, but only once, and only before it releases.
Generally is advised to participate in the one closest to your game release (as the demo will be most polished)
@@renan2005 Thanks to both of you ^^
To be honest, I use Steam since almost 10 years ... 1 month ago was the first time that I heard about it.
Do you live in hotels?
Video done in a hotel room :) is marnix in Japan already ? :)
Check the end of the vid, wish I was in Japan though... -M
Ah I see ... Reached the end of the vid now :) lucky fella :) hey I'm glad Ur doing better now btw .... I heard via Thomas on his dev stream the other day. Enjoyyyyn
Every answer that comes out of Marnix' mouth is by definition 'the sexy answer' though, video debunked.
No, its not.
Day 7 of asking for Melon-Pan tier list.