This Steam Next Fest was dominated by two massive strategy games, and that feels weird for an event all about discoverability
Feb. 13, 2024Opinion| Homeworld 3 and Stormgate were huge hits in the latest festival
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Some of the biggest games of the latest Next Fest were games I’d never heard of.Dungeonborne topped charts throughout the week, filling the gap left by fantasy extraction game Dark and Darker, which isn’t available on Steam due to legal restrictions;my personal highlight was Backpack Battles, an autobattler built around the same inventory management ideas as cult roguelike Backpack Hero;SoulmaskandDread Dawnborrowed some from thebest survival gamesto spend much of the week hovering around the top ten. That’s an expansive list of excellent up-and-comers, but their presence was halted by the impact of some genuine juggernauts.
Real-time marketing strategy
Dwarfing Pacific Drive, however, were two real-time strategy games with serious pedigree. One of them wasHomeworld 3, the latest offering in a series that has spanned 25 years, two sequels, a remaster, and a spin-off prequel. The Homeworld series' history is a convoluted one, and developer Blackbird Interactive hasn’t always been at the helm, but it’s safe to say that this isn’t an underdog, and its presence towards the top of the Next Fest charts struck me as even more galling when the game suffered athree-month delay while its demo was live.
Even Homeworld 3, however, pales in comparison to the real big stack bully: Stormgate. A new IP from a new studio, it’s not as though this strategy game doesn’t deserve a spot at Next Fest, but this is no simple RTS. Stormgate is the RTS successor to the biggest-ever games in the genre, hailing from a team of Warcraft and StarCraft veterans. And that heritage is only part of the equation –Stormgate recently raised $2 million through a Kickstarter campaignthat hit every stretch goal and saw the game knocking on the door of some of the biggest gaming crowdfunding efforts ever. That’s an impressive feat, but it was undermined somewhat by the revelation thatStormgate was already fully-funded before its Kickstarter began.
All of these games are entitled to market themselves however they like, and it’s sensible to take advantage of this rare opportunity for free game testing outside the core audience. But I can’t help but feel like there’s a touch of cheesing the system at play here. Homeworld 3 and Stormgate are successors to some of the most beloved, successful games in this genre, and as a result have had plenty of press in the run-up to their release. All of that attention is the kind of thing to contribute directly to healthy pre-release wishlists, which then place these games right at the top of the Next Fest charts before those charts have even formed. This time round, it took days for the dust to settle to allow other demos to bubble up organically. As Steam Next Fest becomes an increasingly key part of the pre-release efforts for a growing number of games, we’re likely to see bigger games feature more regularly, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of games that actually need the discoverability that Next Fest was designed to offer.
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
From Metroidvanias to roguelikes, survival games to strategy games, here are the best things we played during Steam Next Fest.
I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles strategy game kills Splinter and Shredder before a moment of gameplay happens, all so it can tell its own story
Free-to-play tactical RPG Girls’ Frontline 2: Exilium is out now on PC and mobile
