this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Gaming

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Anyone else disappointed by Steam's current Next Fest? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by ech@lemmy.ca to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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I generally look forward to these little demo fests. While it's never exactly been a flood of mind blowing games, I usually find a handful of upcoming games that stand out and show some promise. This time around, though, I'm left dispirited by all the slop flooding the lists. Generated slop. Asset-flip slop. The few games that aren't I only find after wading through pages upon pages of rubbish, and then it's a crapshoot on if it seems worth downloading. I eventually gave up and don't have much interest in trying again.

I've long been a fan and supporter of the indie scene, understanding that the diamonds that make it worth it take effort to find. But if this is what we have to look forward to, I'm concerned how it'll fare as the requisite effort to sift through the dregs grows exponentially. Eventually it's just too much.

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[–] chameleon@fedia.io 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).

The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 months ago

Interesting. I was wondering why there wasn't the usual "Most Popular Demos" button on the main page.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They have to disclose that Ai was used. So you should be able to filter them out. At least in theory. This should be a general setting in https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/ . Maybe you could exclude some titles by tags, but I would be careful to not exclude normal and good games by accident. Maybe there is a Steam Curator for this job (does anyone else use the Steam Curators?).

As for the Next Fest itself, my internet is extremely bad since 2 months. I have no clue what's on it right now... :-(

[–] kurcatovium@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Well, I believe there are ways where AI is helpful in games. Like brute force translation to languages nobody would pay translator for. Or some automation of world. Or maybe populating world with objects. Or modeling character visuals. But why would anyone want game with story, gameplay loop or quests made by AI? Or AI made lore? Dafuq is that?!

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I also not entirely against Ai, if its ethically correct and used wisely without slop. I am looking forward for 2 major improvements in the future:

    1. not important throw away NPCs in RPGs with some (local) Ai support when talking to them, this is already explored, and
    1. multiplayer enemies with advanced Ai acting exactly like humans, with a human vision, reaction and thinking, this would make mulitplayer games possible to play offline without servers, and I even envision that we can download "training" data of other players such as friends or professional celebrities

Not to mention (as you mentioned already) for development. The problem is, the current industry uses Ai reckless, producing slop, and using stolen training data. Also agreed, please don't create games their story, main plot and gameplay entirely by Ai...

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

But no AI models are ethical because they've all been trained on material that they did not have the rights to... Ok ok, I'm sure some niche models have been, but literally none of the major corpo products that are most likely to be used were.

[–] belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 5 points 2 months ago

So much ai shit. It sucks

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That’s usually how it is at the start, there’s no real sorting the first few days. By Thursday and Friday the slop should start to fall off

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've found some good stuff (Bus Bound, Bubsy 4D), but none of it through the actual Steam Next Fest store page. That indeed seems to be overloaded with low-effort crap.

[–] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Bubsy? Good stuff? Is bubsy finally good?

Edit: huh based on the trailer it actually looks fun.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes! It's the Demon Turf devs, so it's in competent hands. The demo is quite fun. Also filled with self-aware references to Bubsy's... colorful past.

[–] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah just checked the trailer, pleasantly surprised by how polished it looks.