• Steam is set to host the latest edition of its Next Fest, starting today at 19:00 CAT.
• The event will seek to highlight the most anticipated indie games on the platform where demos and livestreams will be showcased.
• In last year’s edition, Steam users were able to try out the demo for the System Shock remake.

While AAA juggernauts and mobile mainstays keep the gaming industry afloat and in popular culture, there is a hidden cabal of people who enjoy playing the smaller, more unique titles that spring up from the indie market.

Independent games are where a lot of innovation is found in gaming. This portion of the industry gave us new genres like “rogue-like,” brought us to new unique heights of narrative and choice with Disco Elysium, and took hair-trigger action gameplay into the future with Hades. A few have even broken out as huge commercial success stories in the past.

Steam has become the gateway to the indie market, listing thousands of independent games, from small studios down to single-dev projects. Every so often the Valve-owned marketplace will host an edition of the Next Fest, where top indie projects are highlighted by Steam through livestreams and free demos.

The latest edition of the Steam Next Fest is happening today at 19:00 CAT, where the marketplace promises “hundreds of demos and hours of livestreaming,” showing off upcoming and anticipated games from indie developers.

Past editions of the Next Fest, like the one held earlier this year in February, showed off loads of upcoming games, with free demos available. Titles it let users try ranged from just about any genre you could think of and contained several obscure releases. However, one of the biggest demos available that edition was for the remake of System Shock.

The trailer for the June 2023 edition of the Next Fest contains a few of the games players will be able to try out. This includes medieval action game Warhaven, a game where you can renovate a house in first-person, a hospital tycoon-like and what looks to be a horror platformer, among many others.

June’s Steam Next Fest will run until the 26th, so that should give plenty of time for indie fans to check out a few games and hopefully generate some interest for the marketplace’s smaller developers.

If you’re interested in checking out some of the demos right now, many developers are using #SteamNextFest on Twitter right now to show players what they are offering.

[Image – Steam]