Today marks the beginning of Steam Next Fest, the thrice-yearly, week-long smorgasbord of delectable demos served up by game creators of all sizes as samplers for their in-development delights. And unsurprisingly, as the Steam catalog adds tens of thousands of games every year, that translates into a lot of demos.
To be precise: This season's Next Fest is, at time of writing, featuring 4,347 demos. And that number will increase throughout the week.
That's already a big number, sure, but the scale of the available selection becomes a lot clearer—and more staggering—when you put it in terms of playtime. Let's say you wanted to conduct a thorough survey of Steam's immediate future by giving each Next Fest demo a half-hour of your time. An admirable undertaking! And one that would demand at least three months.
Spending 30 minutes with the 4,347 demos on the current slate would take you 2,173 and a half hours, or roughly 90.6 days. And that's without breaks for food, sleep, biological necessities, or even the time it would take to switch from one game to another. If you started today, many of those games would be released by the time you finished as part of this fall's frantic glut of pre-GTA game launches.
Still, you'd get to enjoy plenty of variety along the way: As is ever the case, Next Fest has something for everyone. If you've spent years hoping for another Titanfall, you could try Empulse, an FPS with spiritually similar wall-running and mech-dropping. Maybe an isometric spaceship extraction shooter about building a starbase in the aftermath of cosmic horror is more your speed. If so, Omen has a demo open.
Or you might just want to shoot a very, very big cannon. In that case, let me point you at the steam-driven hydraulics and hand-calculated firing solutions of Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator.
As explored above, that's just scratching the surface of the playable previews available this week. We'll be writing up our favorite Next Fest demos across the site, so keep checking back for our thoughts on games that you might have overlooked. Your wishlist can never be too full.
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