After a brief announcement on the Steamworks Development group a week ago, Valve have now properly announced the next three Steam Game Festivals. This is where Steam users get to play through a ton of limited-time demos, which originally started back in December 2019 to go along with The Game Awards.
Not just demos, as there are also livestreams, Q&A sessions with developers and a whole lot more. It's interesting but there's so much crammed in that it can be hard to follow it all. You're not expected to be able to look at everything though but it may perhaps give you a chance to demo a game or two you've been waiting on. You can see a little overview here of the last one if you missed it, which was a lot of fun.
The first is the 2020 Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition, which happens between October 7th at 10am PST, to Tuesday, October 13th at 10am PST. We also now know the next two will happen in February 2021 and June 2021. To be eligible, developers can only opt into one of the events, as their game needs to be releasing within six months of the festival. I see where Valve are going with that, as to make the demos have more of an impact any longer and the feel and excitement over a demo might have greatly diminished. It is, after all, marketing in the form of a fun event.
A new dedicated page is up on Steam here.
Developers: if you're going to have a Linux demo for this event, please reach out to us to let us know.
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