How to make a great Steam Next Fest demo

First Impressions

Hey! It’s Mark

So, this week is Steam Next Fest, which is an online festival for upcoming games, where everyone gets to show off the demo for their next project.

And my new game – the roguelike spell ’em up Word Play – is in the showcase.

Now I’m actually really happy with how things have gone in the lead-up to Next Fest, and I’m confident that the demo will have the best possible chance of standing out and getting those all-important wishlists.

So I wanted to share 7 tips for how to make a demo, and how to get the most out of Steam Next Fest.

Sound good?

Okay, then let’s start with Tip Number 1 –

Launch your demo before Next Fest begins

So, there’s nothing in the rules that says your demo has to debut at the start of Next Fest. So I actually released the demo for Word Play about 2 weeks before Next Fest began. And that turned out to be a great decision.

For one thing, it helped the game gain a bunch of wishlists – about 25,000 before Next Fest even started. But I also got an enormous amount of feedback from players – and could use this to improve and fix the demo before the event kicked off.

So, for instance, in the first version of the demo, you could only spell a word up to 10 tiles long. But players told me that it felt bad to find a word that’s longer – and not be able to play it. So, okay, I changed it – and now if you keep adding letters then a secret second row of tile holders appears.

Players also found it annoying to get into the shop screen – and not be able to see the letter bag or the letter grid. So I added buttons that let you open the bag or peek behind the cards to see the game board. I also added the ability to break glass tiles after making them, and a way to sort the letter grid into alphabetical order. Plus – I fixed loads of bugs. So, so many bugs.

So, remember – you only get one chance with Steam Next Fest. And if you want to put your best foot forward, release your demo in advance in order to find and fix the biggest issues before the event goes live.

Tip Number 2 is to show enough, but not too much

This is a tricky one to get right, and will change for every game. But the basic premise is sound.

So for instance – my demo for Mind Over Magnet was way too short. The demo only contained the first world and that clocked in at a measly 15 minutes of gameplay. Which wasn’t very satisfying, didn’t stick around long enough to get people excited, and probably didn’t help the game with the Steam algorithm.

But, on the other hand, you’ve probably played a demo that was so good, and so full of content, that you got your fill with the freebie and never actually bought the full thing.

So you want to aim for something that will show off why the game is fun, and even give players a reason to play multiple times – but you also want to leave a lot out for the full release.

So in Word Play I found a pretty good balance – the demo has about 25 perks, which is enough for strategies and synergies and replayability, but is a long way off the full game’s 120 perks. And it has just one mode, whereas the full game will have a bunch of different ways to play.

You can then test whether your demo is long enough by checking the “median time played” stat in Steamworks. You should aim for somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes. Word Play is bang in the middle with almost exactly 1 hour of median playtime. But if you’re not happy with the number you see? Well, good job you launched your game before Next Fest and can add or remove content before the event kicks off.

Another good tip is to look at other demos in your game’s genre. How much are they giving away?

Tip Number 3 is to give a great first impression

A demo is free. Which means that players have invested nothing – and so will happily quit out and delete your demo if they are bored, frustrated, or generally unimpressed.

There are a few ways to avoid this. Make sure the presentation is solid. I waited until Zach had composed some music before launching the demo because a completely silent game does not scream high quality.

In terms of difficulty, I would err on the side of easier rather than harder. You generally don’t want players to rage quit your demo in frustration. An easy demo is better – especially because players know the full game will get harder.

And you should find ways to give players a good initial experience, even if it’s a little constructed. So in the demo for Word Play I made sure to include two perks that pair really well – an upgrade that lets you make golden tiles, and a modifier where if you submit a golden tile, the tile to the right becomes golden. This creates a silly synergistic strategy of endlessly getting golden tiles, which just feels great and will leave players with a strong impression. And with only 25 perks in the demo, this situation is pretty likely to come up, almost guaranteeing a good time.

Remember that a demo is not a playtest build. It’s not a way to get feedback and bug reports. It’s marketing – so do whatever it takes to cast your game in the best possible light.

Tip Number 4 is to tease content that isn’t in the demo

So, as discussed, you want to leave a lot out for the actual paid release. But don’t leave players guessing about how much more content there is left to discover.

So you can do this inside the game itself. Like I said – the Word Play demo has only one mode. But I made sure to leave in the buttons for all the other modes, just with a lock icon and a tag that says “available in the full release.” Also, the game has just one type of special tile – the golden tile. But from the logo, you can see that there are other types of tile available. What does the green tile do? The blue tile? The red tile with the dot? The… bubbly red water tile? There’s clearly more to this game!

But you can also do it outside the game, too. So before Next Fest began I made a Steam news event for the game that simply describes all of the stuff that isn’t in the demo, but will be in the full game. How there will be more perks, more special tiles, more special rounds, more music, more everything. That way players can understand what’s to come and – fingers crossed – add the game to their wishlist.

Oh, and you can make that easier by literally putting a button in your demo that will take people directly to the Steam store page.

Tip Number 5 is to send all of your feedback to a single location

Okay, so when I first launched the Word Play demo… I was getting a lot of feedback. Bug reports. Feature requests. Ideas for modifiers and special rounds and modes. Everything you could think of.

But those reports were distributed across, well, replies on Bluesky, Discord DMs, emails, the comments on two different YouTube videos, and discussions on the game’s Steam forum. Which was completely overwhelming. I simply could not keep track of it all.

So – I made a single source for feedback. I made a forum on the GMTK Discord server with places to put bugs, ideas, and requests. And then I funnelled everything into that forum. I made a pinned post on the Steam forums telling people to go to the Discord server. I put pinned comments on the YouTube videos with the same. And I even put a “report an issue” button into the game – which loads up a page linking to the Discord server.

Now I can more easily track these issues and reply to them.

Though, the most common piece of feedback was not a bug. Or a feature request. It was simply… why does the game not let me spell WAIFU? Or YEET? Or RIZZ?

Yeah, this is one of the perils of making a word game. Your dictionary will never catch everything that people consider to be a real word.

So I knew I needed a bespoke solution for this.

For starters, I added a tutorial that appears the first time you spell an invalid word and explains that proper nouns like countries and companies aren’t accepted. But also – every time you spell an invalid word it will add a button to the options panel which lets you petition for that word to be included in future updates.

Click this button and it shoots an event to Unity’s analytics – and I can then get a massive spreadsheet of every word that’s been petitioned. Then I can go through them one by one and – as the great arbiter of words – decide which ones should go in the game. The first batch I added included terms like BESTIE, BOOLEAN, EMOJI, GAMIFY, NERFING, and WEEABOO.

I’m really glad I got all of this sorted before Next Fest as it has made my life a whole lot easier.

Tip Number 6 is to block content properly

Okay, if you’re making a demo for a game, sometimes the easiest thing to do is just upload your full game build but block access to the stuff outside the demo. In my case, I have a checkbox inside Unity for “demo”, and if that’s ticked then the game only shuffles in the first 25 perks on the stack. And it makes sure the buttons for the other modes are made non-interactable.

Now I knew that there was probably some technical way to make this content accessible again… but what I didn’t expect was that on the literal first day that I dropped the demo, someone let me know that they had fiddled with the files, unchecked that box, and opened up the rest of the game. Oops. So, from the next patch onwards I made sure that the demo files only contained 25 perks and 1 round, meaning that there was no way to restore the rest of the content.

Now this might sound like a big goof on my part, but it’s actually not uncommon. I remember when the Shadow Complex demo launched on Xbox Live Arcade and there was a relatively simple way to bypass the end of the demo and play through the whole game. And also, remember when Sega accidentally uploaded the full version of Yakuza 6 as a demo? Oopsie.

So – whatever you put in the demo version of your game, just assume that someone will figure out a way to access it. And so make sure that the demo only contains the content… from the demo.

And finally, Tip Number 7 is to release your game shortly after the release of the demo

If someone plays your demo, gets excited, and wishlists your game – you should ideally be able to deliver them the full experience before they forget about it and lose interest. So don’t wait a year for the actual game to come out.

And that’s why I’m pleased to announce that the full version of Word Play will be out on Steam on July 14th, 2025 – with 120 perks, loads of special rounds, loads of modes, more music, more features, and more words.

Thanks for watching, please consider adding the game to your Steam wishlist. And I’ll see you soon.