Steam Game Festival is returning for the fall

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Geoff Keighley said the big digital event on Steam will run for a week in October.

(Image credit: Valve)

The Steam Game Festival debuted in December 2019 in conjunction with The Game Awards, with time-limited demos for 13 upcoming games. A spring edition followed in March, to help make up for the loss of GDC, with a longer time-frame—five days instead of 48 hours—and demos for 40 games. The a week-long Summer Game Festival dropped 900 demos in our lap and, well, we did our best.

And it's coming back again: Geoff Keighley, who knows about these sorts of things, said on Twitter today that the Steam Game Festival: Autum Edition will give us even more game demos in October.

Valve hasn't revealed any details about the fall festival just yet, but I sincerely hope that it takes a different approach than the summer event. 900 game demos all at once was way too many, especially for an event that only ran for a week. There's just no way to get through more than a small fraction of that number in any useful way in such a short time-frame, which means that attention ends up going to games that are already well known and thus least in need of it. A week of free stuff is great, but as a way to discover new and interesting things that you might've overlooked, I don't think it's a good approach to take.

I've reached out to Valve for more information on the next Steam Game Festival, and will update when I know more.

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Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.