Steam Next Fest gave one indie game a 51,500% increase in players—'1 week ago we had 3 players… thank you all so much'

(Image credit: Valve)

I sometimes wonder if Steam Next Fest has run its course, if—like so much of Steam—it's become so overwhelmed by stuff that it's impossible to pick through it all and find the real gems. Is it really possible for little-known games to make a big splash anymore? I had my doubts.

And turns out I was wrong to have them, because one game that had a grand total of three players a week before the last Next Fest absolutely rocketed up the charts during the event itself. Conradical, the dev behind Desktop Defender—an idle auto-battler that perches on your desktop while you work—announced on X this week that its game had become one of Next Fest's most-played (via GamesRadar). "One week ago, we had three players".

1 week ago we had 3 players, today I got this e-mail.Thank you all so much ♥️ pic.twitter.com/AcG7Q9ltXiOctober 20, 2025

How well did it do? Well, per the wizards of SteamDB, Desktop Defender's demo hit an all-time peak of 1,548 concurrent players during the most recent Next Fest. That's a 51,500% increase on its previous playerbase of 'three guys'. The full game, meanwhile, now has 1,244 followers—up from 22 on October 13.

That makes it, per an email sent to Conradical by Valve, one of the 50 most-played demos of the entire Next Fest event. Indeed, it's right there on Valve's post-event roundup, sandwiched between Sealchain: Call of Blood, and Motorslice. It's currently Steam's 1,148th most-wishlisted game.

It's a hell of an uplift, that's for sure. Does it show the ongoing value of Next Fest? I suppose so, but I also think it demonstrates the chaotic nature of the platform. Games sink or swim and find major success or total failure without much obvious logic (save that, you know, it helps to have made a good game and usually doesn't to have made a bad one, though even that's no guarantee of anything).

Putting a game on Steam, or in the Steam Next Fest, feels a little like chucking a message in a bottle into the ocean—it might end up exactly where you want it to go, or it might slip beneath the waves forever.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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