Back in June Steam had Next Fest, a combination site-wide sale and demo release that allowed buyers to not only find new games to buy, but to play them before purchase too.

In a recap posted to Steam Community, Valve has highlighted the benefits for participating in order to draw in more developers and publishers for the next Next Fest happening in October.

To do this Valve has leaned on several stats from the 2020 Next Fest. Two of these you can see in the header image above, but there’s even more.

“Among 2020 Next Fest participants, the median game saw daily wishlist additions jump 421% during the fest, compared to the two weeks leading up to the event. Wishlisting rates were higher than 421% for half of participating games, while 45% saw a smaller increase, and 5% experienced a decrease in their rate of wishlist additions,” the announcement reads.

What’s interesting is that, even after the event was over, wishlisting of participating games continued. Valve reports a 15 percent daily increase three weeks after Next Fest, when compared to two weeks before the event happened.

At this point it’s worth talking a bit about why wishlisting is so important. For the people and companies making games it means that any updates and releases are reported directly to potential customers by ways of Steam’s various channels such as direct emails and the Steam News Hub.

After years of talking to indie developers the importance of the wishlist has come up time and time again and, with the focus of Next Fest being smaller games, this isn’t just a case of the big names in the business making even more money.

And going from wishlist to sale is the ultimately important part of the process, something that Valve also addressed.

“To study Next Fest’s impact on sales, we tracked whether Next Fest wishlist additions were converting to sales among the games that have been released since participating in the fest. The median released game saw an increase of 292% in ‘converting wishlists’ made during Next Fest compared to converting wishlist additions made in the two weeks leading to Next Fest,” the company adds.

All of these positive figures are to encourage more game makers to participate in Next Fest in October. Registration for this closes soon on 15th August, however.

From the point of view of us, the players, this should all mean more games with demos and more sales in the future.