The next Steam Game Festival kicks off in June

I've really been enjoying Steam's seasonal Game Festivals. In a world where I can't go to fun events and play demos and chat to devs, being able to spend a few days discovering all this stuff through digital events has been lovely. If you feel the same, you might be pleased to learn the next Steam Game Festival will take place between June 16th and June 22nd. From the sounds of things, this one will only have brand new demos that haven't been shown at previous festivals.

Steam Game Festivals are roughly week-long events held by Valve every few months, offering tons of demos for people to try out, as well as live streams and developer panels to watch.

According to the info on Steam's marketing documents, developers can only enter a demo for this year's summer event if the game hasn't already been featured at the winter 2021 or autumn 2020 Game Festivals. This could mean there are a few less game to try out, seeing as each Festival tends to have some the same demos as previous events. However, it also means we'll likely see some new bits, which will be nice.

The other criteria for entering a demo is that the game has to be launched after the Festival, but before January 2022. I'm sure there's tons of gems coming out in that time frame - any that you've got an eye on, reader?

The last Game Fest took place earlier this month, and had over 500 (!) demos available. Alice Bee wrote about some of the best ones, including stuff like Little Nightmares 2 and Potioncraft - both of which still have free demos available now (which I highly recommend taking a peek at, Little Nightmares 2 is an RPS bestest best, after all).