The Steam Algorithm doesn't start working when the festival begins; it starts tracking your game weeks in advance. Steam looks at your Wishlist Velocity, which is simply how fast you are gaining new followers compared to other games.

If you enter the festival with a "cold" page and zero momentum, the algorithm will bury you on page 50 of your category. You need to spend the month of January driving people to your page through devlogs, GIFs, or social media.

If Steam sees a spike in interest before the event even starts, it "flags" your game as a potential hit and gives you a much better starting position on the festival’s front page.

Steam organizes the festival based on tags, and these tags act like the GPS for your game. If your Metadata Optimization is wrong, Steam will show your game to the wrong crowd.

For example, if you are tagged as "Survival" but you are actually a slow "Crafting Sim," people will download your demo, realize it’s not what they wanted, and quit immediately. This high "bounce rate" tells the Steam Algorithm that your game isn't satisfying players, and it will stop recommending you.

You must audit your top five tags to ensure they match your gameplay perfectly. Also, keep your "About This Game" section simple: use short sentences and high-quality GIFs instead of long walls of text.

The most important signal for Steam during Next Fest is "Median Playtime." It isn't just about how many people download your demo; it’s about how long they stay inside it.

If thousands of people download the game but only play for two minutes, Steam assumes the game is broken or boring and will lower your visibility. You need to make sure your demo is "sticky" by putting your most exciting mechanics in the first ten minutes.

Avoid long, boring tutorials. The longer people play, the more the algorithm believes your game is high-quality, which leads to your game being featured in more Discovery Queues across the entire platform.

During Next Fest, Steam features a "Live Now" bar at the top of the event page, and this is the most valuable real estate on the site. To stay there, you need a high number of concurrent viewers on your store page.

The best way to handle this in 2026 is to run a high-quality, pre-recorded loop of your best gameplay, but you must have someone active in the chat to answer questions. This keeps people on the page longer, increasing your "dwell time."

The longer a person stays on your page to watch the stream, the more likely they are to hit the wishlist button, and Steam rewards this engagement by keeping you at the top of the list.

As soon as your demo gains traction, your inbox will be flooded with emails from "Steam Curators" asking for keys in exchange for a review. You need to know that 99% of these are a scam.

These are scammers who use bots to inflate their follower counts so they can trick developers into giving them keys, which they then sell on grey market sites like G2A.

Real influencers and curators rarely reach out with a generic "give me keys" email. If you send them keys, you aren't getting marketing. You are just losing potential revenue to resellers.

A lot of developers think pricing doesn't matter until the game is actually for sale, but that's a mistake. Steam’s popularity rankings are global.

If you haven't localized your store page and signaled that you will support fair Regional Pricing for major markets like China, Brazil, or Turkey, you are losing out on a massive number of wishlists.

Even though these wishlists might come from regions with lower purchasing power, they count exactly the same as a US wishlist in the eyes of the algorithm. Having a global appeal helps push your game higher on the overall "Trending" charts, which in turn brings in more high-value traffic from everywhere else.

The week after Next Fest is usually when you see a "wishlist hangover," where people start clearing out games they aren't actually interested in.

To prevent this, you need to stay active in the Steam News Hub. Don't just say "thanks for playing." Share actual data, like how many levels were completed or what the most popular character was.

This keeps your game in the players' notification feeds and transforms them from "casual demo players" into a loyal community. The goal is to keep the conversation going so that when you finally launch with your discount, they are already primed to buy.