Steam Next Fest’s wishlist winners
Next Fest wrapped up yesterday (March 2), so let’s dive into the event's top games by new wishlisters, including Marathon. But we've also got pirates, gnomes, vampires, and cowboys.
February’s Next Fest saw over 3,000 demos fighting for oxygen. Of course, plenty of smaller titles picked up some buzz. But in the current attention economy, Next Fest has mostly evolved from a discovery engine into a stress test for pre-existing momentum.
Let’s take a look at the games that got the most wishlists during the event.
Windrose rose to the top
Co-op pirate survival game Windrose took the #1 spot, securing 351K new wishlists during the week-long event. This brings Windrose’s total count to over 1.3M, so Next Fest – and related promotions – account for about a quarter of wishlisters.
Around 11.7% of Windrose’s total wishlisters played the demo, which was the third-most-played during the event.
Windrose has been building this momentum for nearly a year. The Uzbekistan-based developer, Windrose Crew, has been disciplined in its community management, growing a Discord server of 40K members through ongoing developer interaction and alpha playtests.
Windrose was also highlighted at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted back in December, and that long-lead hype clearly reached a boiling point this week.
Our data shows that around half of Windrose’s wishlisters previously played The Forest or Valheim. It’s tapping into that specific co-op survival-crafting hunger, but swapping the typical forest or fantasy setting for deep naval exploration and – surprisingly – soulslike combat.
It works really well.
Despite the small team size, Windrose looks stunning on high-end machines, too. Focusing on a PvE experience that scales for both solo and group play, Windrose Crew has so far done a nice job of turning the ship away from the sweatiness that can cause friction in this type of game (looking at you, Sea of Thieves).
That said, over a third of Windrose’s wishliters have played Sea of Thieves previously. Given the positive reaction to the demo, I’m expecting plenty of Sea of Thieves regulars to – sorry in advance – jump ship when Windrose launches proper.
Marathon also got plenty of engagement, but underlined some early-game challenges
Bungie’s Marathon secured the #2 spot for new wishlisters this Next Fest, adding 213K new wishlists and bringing its total to about 1.2M. A high 29.8% of those wishlisters played the Server Slam, the second-highest ratio in our top five.
I was very curious about this one, so I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Marathon (also, Resident Evil; more on that on Thursday). I’m happy to report that mechanically, Marathon is sublime.
Plenty of others were also curious about Bungie’s next endeavour, as Marathon’s Server Slam was Next Fest’s most-played demo. But curiosity doesn’t always equal retention. The concurrent user (CCU) data from the recent Server Slam, while not the be-all-end-all, had a sobering contrast to the ARC Raiders playtest from last October.
While ARC Raiders managed to retain most of its audience throughout its testing period, Marathon’s CCU peaked at the very start of the test (141K) and then entered a steady decline, with a particularly steep drop-off on day two.
This quicker decline points directly to some friction I saw firsthand in my time with Marathon: the first-time user experience (FTUE) isn’t great. While Bungie’s gunplay remains best-in-class – feeling like a snappy, refined evolution of Destiny – the transition from the polished tutorial to the actual extraction loop is jarring.
A messy UI combined with the punishingly quick time-to-kill (TTK) only makes things worse, and many players are being sent back to the lobby by AI before they even encounter another human.
Marathon will likely do well due to Bungie’s pedigree and the fantastic mechanics. But for those outside that group, first impressions matter.
While ARC Raiders succeeded by leaning into co-op and social glue, Marathon feels more weighted toward a hardcore PvP environment in its current state. Once I moved past those confusing first hours and internalised Marathon’s loop, it became clear that Bungie has a unique, fantastic game on their hands. Like, generational.
But in today’s oversaturated attention economy, a rocky start is a massive risk. In the world of Steam’s two-hour refund window, a player who feels cheated out of their gear in the first 60 minutes could be a lost player and lost (future) revenue.
Our data suggests Bungie is mostly preaching to the converted:
74% of those who played the Marathon Server Slam previously played Destiny 2.
There’s less overlap with the current market leader than you might expect: only 48% of Marathon testers had played ARC Raiders.
These are slightly different audiences, but the sales velocity could be an early signal that Marathon’s onboarding needs some work.
As of March 2, three days before launch, Marathon had sold just under 250K copies on Steam, as per our estimates. For context, ARC Raiders had sold roughly 550K copies (2.4x more) at the same pre-launch period.
Bungie has the “die-hard” base locked in(🙋), and the studio’s history means plenty will play this one on console. But if Bungie wants to maximise its success here and capture the wider market, it needs to take a leaf from Arc Raiders’ playbook and bridge the gap between stellar presentation and high-friction onboarding.
Gnomes, vampires, and cowboys round things out
As for the rest of the top 5:
Burglin’ Gnomes, a 1-6 player co-op heist game, managed to amass 144K more wishlsiters during Next Fest, bringing its total close to 700K. Nearly half of its total wishlisters played its Next Fest demo, which is the highest engagement ratio in our top five by a wide margin. It suggests that the game’s core hook is incredibly effective at moving players from vague interest to active testing, likely driven by the viral potential of its physics-based mischief. It was the #2 most played demo of the event, second only to Marathon. Another win for friendslop, it seems. One to watch for sure!
Vampire Crawlers, from the makers of Vampire Survivors, added 130K wishlists during Next Fest, representing a massive 43.2% of its total wishlist pool. Around 20% of overall wishlisters played the demo. Around 84% of Vampire Crawlers wishlisters previously played Vampire Survivors, so the IP is pulling its weight in terms of discoverability. Crawlers’ hook lies in its combo-multiplier deckbuilding, where breaking the game is part of the game, but there’s a dungeon-crawler overlap to it all. Like Survivors, it’s less of a traditional RPG and more like a high-speed puzzle that’s great for short attention spans and long, moreish play sessions.
Far Far West secured 101K new wishlists during the week. This push brings its total to over 536K. I also gave this one a shot, and it reminds me of an FPS version of Helldivers 2 in a Western world – in a good way. There’s a lot of Deep Rock Galactic DNA in there, too. Around 19% of Far Far West’s wishlisters played the demo. It seems to be successfully carving out its own space among some much larger established IP. It’s a nice, accessible PvE-focused alternative to the more punishing extraction shooters out there.
However, it’s important to remember that wishlists are just the beginning, and – as we discussed last week – they’re becoming something of a vanity metric. Most games that net wishlists during Next Fest months convert less than 10% into buyers a month after launch.
We’ve focused today on bigger games that already had momentum. So before finishing, I also wanted to spotlight a couple of cool indies that didn’t get over 10K wishlists during the event, but I still had plenty of fun with:
Saint Slayer from Lilymo Games is awesome. It’s a throwback to the older Castlevania games (the action ones, pre-Symphony of the Night). So it’s great for retro-game fans. Warning, though: the synth-gothic music is very catchy. That’s coming out on April 20 on a bunch of platforms.
Airframe Ultra from Akupura Games, which is a love letter to 90s high-speed futuristic racing like Wipeout but with brutal, crunchy vehicular combat. It’s blisteringly fast and frantic, and the nostalgic PS1-era low-fi aesthetic really does it for me.
Lots of nostalgia. God, I’m old now, aren’t I?
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