Key points by Stream Hatchet:
- Twitch and Kick’s Games & Demos category doubles in viewership during Steam Next Fest week
- For the June 2025 edition of Steam Next Fest, Vinesauce generated the most watch time in streams mentioning the event
- There is a strong correlation (0.76) between streaming interest in demos during Steam Next Fest and coverage during a game’s early access/full release.
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Steam Next Fest is back with another week of free-to-play demos for hundreds of upcoming PC games. For players, it’s a scouting window. For developers, this is one of the most intense discovery opportunities on the calendar. In February 2026, we gathered over 3,500 demos, an increase of 51% from February 2025. This reflects how quickly the event has expanded as a springboard for indie games.
That’s very nice, but it also means competition (it hurts). Thankfully, there’s a third party that can help reduce demo noise: Streamers. Live streaming is deeply integrated into the way Next Fest operates, with creators actively programming around the event and viewers tuning in specifically to see what upcoming games are worth watching. In this article, we use June 2025’s Steam Next Fest as a case study to explore exactly how strong that relationship is and whether a game’s streaming performance during demo week is a meaningful predictor of viewership success at launch.
Steam Next Fest boosts streaming demo viewership… and growing
To gauge the relationship between live streaming and Steam Next Fest, a good place to start is the Games & Demos category on Twitch and Kick. It’s a comprehensive home for titles that don’t yet have their own dedicated platform category, making it a useful barometer of demo streaming activity. The baseline between events is approximately 0.5 million to 1 million hours of viewing time each week. During the week of Next Fest, that number roughly doubles overall.
These spikes also continued to rise, peaking at 1.4 million hours watched in February 2024 and setting a new record in February 2026 at 2.3 million hours. This is an increase of approximately 64% over two years. The October edition consistently outperforms June and tends to dip slightly, but this is likely due to June’s Next Fest having to share the spotlight with Summer Game Fest and other summer seasonal pastimes (like going outdoors). However, even the quiet June edition comfortably exceeds the baseline with between 1.3 and 1.6 million hours watched. Streaming viewers are clearly using Next Fest as a window for scouting, and their appetite is growing.
Streamers actively program events with titles targeting the following fests
Next, let’s zoom in on the specific example of Next Fest in June 2025 to get a clearer picture of how streamers are intentionally participating in the event. By tracking streams within the Games & Demos category that include the Next Fest keyword in the title, you can differentiate between creators who are actively programming around the festival and creators who just happen to be streaming smaller titles that week. Before the event, total daily streams for this category ranged from 500 to 890, while keyword streams averaged 1 to 3 per day, a ratio of approximately 1 in 400.
When Next Fest started on June 9th, keyword streams jumped from 2 the day before to 85, peaking at 268 on June 10th. At that point, approximately one-sixth of all game and demo streams were explicitly Next Fest branded, and total streams for this category on the same day increased from a pre-event baseline of close to 800 to 1.5,000. Both lines tell the same story. That said, Next Fest is drawing more streamers into the category overall, and a significant portion of them are there specifically to cover Next Fest. By June 18, just two days after the event ended, the keyword stream was back to 5, a 97% decrease from its peak.
Review feedbackCreators: Vinesauce and Next Fest regulars
It’s helpful to know that streamers are actively programming around Next Fest. It’s better to know which streamer it is. In June 2025, Vinesauce led the top 10 creators in Next Fest-related watch time with 51.4K (more than double)n.d.-Places Patty’s 24.8K). Vinay sauce was also 10th It became the most-watched streamer across games and demos during the same period. This means his dominance in the Next Fest-specific chart is a major presence in the broader category.
The remaining top 10 is split into two quite different profiles. The three creators, Ezekiel_III, Billy1Kirby, and StopGameRu, have 100% of their game and demo viewing time coming from the Next Fest keyword stream, and are only there for the event. Several other companies are in the 68-86% range, while WhiskeyDing0 and KekLuck are in the 31-33% range, giving Next Fest broader coverage. For publishers, it’s worth keeping an eye on these streamers with demo coverage. Even if you can’t (or won’t) partner, watching their streams can be a valuable source of feedback on your demo. Of course, partnering is even better and we can help too.
Most Viewed Demos at Steam Next Fest in June 2025
So far, we’ve looked at the Games & Demo category as a proxy for Next Fest streaming activity. But there’s also another way to approach this. It’s about highlighting games that were already generating enough buzz to earn their own dedicated streaming categories on Twitch and Kick before the event even started. These are the titles that came to Next Fest with pre-momentum, and by tracking demo viewership we can get a clearer read on which games the streaming community was most excited about.
stella blade It topped Next Fest in June 2025, with 730,000 hours watched during the event, an increase of approximately 65% from second place. wild gate and 441K. no, i’m not human and baby steps Both had over 300,000 hours of viewing time, rounding out a strong top four. After that there is a sharp cliff. Positions 5-10 clustered between 45,000 and 151,000, meaning the top four received the majority of demo viewers for this group. Top-tier distributions remind us that even among the most touted Next Fest titles, a handful of titles tend to dominate the conversation.
But what happened when these games actually launched? In this case, we’re talking about either an early access launch (very important for streamers) or a full release. Seven of the top 10 most-watched demos at Next Fest in June 2025 surpassed 1.5 million hours of viewing in the first 30 days of release. This is a strong overall achievement by any measure. no, i’m not human It topped all launches with 6.9 million hours watched, followed by baby steps 5.7M, clover pit At 5.1M. only development (281K), hell is us (537K), and UFL (185K) is below that threshold, suggesting that demo buzz led to post-launch attention for the majority of these titles.
Demo streaming coverage predicts launch success
To dig deeper into the relationship between demos and launches, we took the top 50 demos by peak concurrent players that were released in early access or full release from Next Fest in June 2025 and ranked them by 1) time watched during Next Fest and 2) the first 30 days after launch (thanks to GameDiscoverCo. for their help!). Plotting these two rankings against each other provides a direct visual read into whether the streaming buzz during demo week actually carries through to launch.
The correlation between the two rankings is 0.76, indicating a strong positive relationship over 50 games. Simply put, if a game performed well on live streaming during Next Fest, it’s likely to perform just as well on live streaming at launch (compared to other titles in this sample). This finding can be combined with what we established in previous research. Next Fest’s streaming performance is a key early signal in the full discovery pipeline, as streaming awareness drives Steam wishlists, which in turn drive sales. That signal is especially valuable for indie developers, who often have little marketing budget to build hype from scratch.
However, there are some outliers here, and I’d like to highlight just one to show how the game can break out of its Steam Next Fest funk. take express delivery: Ranked approximately 13th at Next Fest. It was an incredible performance. Don’t get me wrong. However, after its release, it became the #1 ranked game in this sample. How did they achieve such a huge rise? In July 2025, just weeks after Next Fest, publisher AdHoc Studio announced a full partnership with Critical Role, bringing together the popular group’s voice cast and huge online community. express deliveryIt will enter orbit ahead of its launch in October. The hype that turned a promising demo into a streaming behemoth proves that Next Fest is often just the first move in a long campaign.
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Steam Next Fest has always been important to game discovery, but live streaming is becoming an increasingly important part of that equation. Streaming viewers consistently double their engagement with the Games & Demo category at each event, creators actively schedule, and the most talked-about demos on stream tend to carry that positive sentiment directly into launch. The 0.76 correlation between Next Fest streaming rank and post-launch streaming rank across 50 games is a strong statistical argument that demo week performance is a signal of success.
Streaming awareness builds wishlists, and wishlists drive sales. For indie developers and publishers, understanding how your game is perceived at each stage can mean the difference between a successful launch and being lost in the noise. If you want to track the process in detail, from demo buzz to post-release performance, Stream Hatchet can help.
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