Valve has just announced the start date for the next Steam Next Fest event in June. Known previously as the Steam Game Festival before it was renamed last year, Steam Next Fest puts the spotlight on indie developers by showcasing their latest projects with free demos and livestreams with the talented creators behind them. Hundreds of PC indie games are shown off at these week-long Steam Next Fest events, all providing gamers with a chance to check out some of Steam's smaller-scale offerings that they might not have discovered otherwise.
The last Steam Next Fest event was held quite recently, with up to 600 free demos being offered up on Steam at the end of February. The most popular and noteworthy among the many titles sampled during Febuary's Steam Next Fest showcase included Golfie, a deck-building mini-golf simulator that tasks players with using special cards to pull off seemingly impossible trick shots, an RTS colony simulator titled The Wandering Village, and Kao the Kangaroo, a colorful throwback to the anthropomorphic 3D platformers of the early 2000s. These are just a few of the many free demos offered up during last month’s Steam Next Fest, and now it appears that Valve is ready to shine a light on the indie PC gaming scene once again later this year.
As reported by VG247, Valve recently announced that a new Steam Next Fest showcase event will be held in June, starting on June 13 and concluding the following week on June 20. During that seven-day time frame, users will be able to check out several free Steam demos and provide feedback to the developers of these titles ahead of their full releases later on. So far, there is no word yet on what games and indie developers will be participating, but if previous Steam Next Fest events are of any indication players should expect a wide range of genres to be represented.
Valve has already had a busy and eventful 2022 thanks to the recent launch of the Steam Deck, a portable console that allows Steam users to carry their library of PC games with them in a style reminiscent of the Nintendo Switch. In a keynote speech made last week, Google’s Product Director for Games Greg Hartell let it slip that Steam was branching out onto Chromebook devices, and Bethesda also revealed that it plans to migrate its previously in-house PC launcher to Steam a few weeks ago.
With big-name companies partnering up with Valve and the advent of what is essentially a fourth major gaming console, it can be easy to forget that Steam is home to a wide range of smaller indie releases on top of the PC ports of major triple-A releases like Dying Light 2. Steam Next Fest gives these titles a chance to shine by offering up free demos to anyone looking for something different to spice up their PC gaming for a full week, and the upcoming June 2022 event isn’t likely to be different, June’s Steam Next Fest will begin on June 13 at 10 am PT (or 1 pm ET) and run until June 20.
Source: VG247