The demo festivals that Valve hosts multiple times a year offers PC gamers the chance to try out a whole lot of upcoming games for no cost. It is now time for the latest edition, with the company kicking off the Steam Next Fest of February 2024, offering an entire week to get your hands on hundreds of gameplay slices.
Valve"s "multi-day celebration of upcoming games" can be accessed by going to the event"s hub page here. The hundreds of experiences available can be easily sorted and filtered there, with separate pages for genres and the Steam tags system making new discoveries easier. Logging in to Steam before browsing the page will enable Valve"s recommendation algorithms to do their magic for users too.
Scrolling down, the event"s most popular and the platform"s highest wishlisted games with demos can be found. The favorites list should be fluctuating quite a bit as the masses begin trying out more and more demos. Game livestreams straight from the developers as well as QnA sessions are planned to keep rolling throughout the event as well.
The trends at the start of the event has the RTS Stormgate, mech-based farming game Lightyear Frontier, 4X strategy game Millennia, and the supernatural driving sim Pacific Drive already rising to the top, all being upcoming games.
Like in previous events, you"ll find that a majority of demos available are from indie developers showcasing their upcoming wares, though there are a few major publishers involved too. Keep in mind that these are pre-release gameplay slices that are being presented, so there may be some bugs to work around.
The first Steam Next Fest of 2024 will come to an end on February 12 at 10AM PT. Two more Steam Next Fest promotions are planned for the year, with the next demo festival slated to kick off in June.