Steam’s Game Festival May Return in June

Following its Autumn edition which was held back in October 2020, Steam’s recently concluded Game Festival was a big hit with gamers. The week-long winter event, held earlier this month, brought over 500 new indie demos to Valve’s digital distribution platform and also included various live streams and interactive Q&A’s with developers.

The next edition of the festival is slated to take place later this year between June 16 and June 22. The signature format of Q&A’s, live streams, and of course new demos will return. During the event, developers will get the chance to build an audience for their game and get feedback from players which they can incorporate in their final release.

Valve plans to put a special curation team in place to determine which games will be included in the festival in June. The names of the demos that will premiere at the festival are yet unreleased but they can only participate if they have a release date of no later than January 2022. Additionally, they should’ve not participated in the previous two Steam Festivals. Early Access games will be considered as long as they haven’t released a playable build before the festival begins.

It is not known yet if titles will stay on after festival week is done. This is a legitimate concern as there could be too many titles for players to cover in one week. However, the festival from this month has seen some titles stay on. So, gamers looking to dive into something new can still sink their teeth into demos like Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, Loop Hero, Warhammer 340339,000: Dakka Squadron, and Little Nightmares 2.

Steam recently smashed its concurrent user record and went on to record 26.4 million monthly users, beating XBox Live and PlayStation by a significant margin. With Valheim also smashing records consistently, games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, PUBG, and Apex Legends are also seeing major traction on the online platform.

About Steam

Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve Softwares. It was launched as a standalone software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games and was subsequently expanded to include games from third-party publishers. Steam also serves as an online web-based and mobile digital storefront.