https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest

June edition is live and my religion prompts me to download as many demos as my ssd can welcome and play them throughout the week. I usually hover around a good hundred, and that’s still a very small percentage of all demos available. I like to sort and evaluate them on a piece of paper (pic below from february).

Anyway here are some takeaways so far (still downloading):

• this edition, I’m noticing builds that are heavier than they should (based on what the game looks like), some indie games are approaching 2Gb of download, when I was used to the 500Mb - 1Gb range
• as always the most wishlisted demos aren’t the best, upcoming AA games are all looks no essence for up to 30Gb, I usually play them first to get rid of them and make space for more interesting indie games
• Jusant and Cairn had their impact on the industry, there’s a bunch of climbing games (mixed with the Only Up / Getting Over It formula) trying to ride the trend
• Noticing a lot of JRPGs inspired games as well, can’t correlate with the success of Expedition 33 but my guess is that there’s a big audience for those
• You still have a ton of survival crafting / chill farming games, but less than previous editions (I think it was October 2025 that was riddled with those)
• I’ll edit this post with more insights as I go through the demos

In this spoiler, the full list of demos I downloaded so far (will update throughout the week), I usually download the ones I already wishlisted (~15 to 20), then go through the trending ones (~10), and finally just doomscroll looking at interesting stuff: