Just Fly: Steam Next Fest post mortem
It is almost three weeks after the Steam Next Fest, and all stats and feelings have settled down. Here is a summary of my experience with the festival: how my game Just Fly started and sailed through it, whether it helped, and what I will do next with it. I didn’t have any expectations because I joined with under 100 wishlists, which is too few. So let’s dig in.
The Steam Next Fest (SNF) tripled Just Fly’s wishlists, from 84 to 268 total. I know this is still not enough for a commercially successful game, but usually the SNF just doubles the wishlists. So in this regard (only :D), it was successful. Before the fest, my only marketing was Reddit posts, the itch.io web demo , and a few YouTube videos.
This is the second game of my gamedev learning journey, so I don’t have high hopes for its success. With this game, I am trying to focus more on the marketing side of gamedev, not just on making a game. That is why I joined the Steam Next Fest. I didn’t even know it existed when I worked on my first game, the 3D puzzle game Soma Cube.
TL;DR
- It was definitely worth it. SNF wishlists are free, however small the number is :)
- Wishlists went from 84 to 268, which is more than the usual doubling of wishlists
- After the fest, new wishlists dropped to about one per day – three weeks later, the game has 289 wishlists in total and 265 outstanding
- Have the capsule made by an artist ready before the fest, I changed mine on day 4
- My live streams (under five viewers) and YouTube Shorts (around 1,000 views) brought almost no traffic – too small YT channel
- From day 5, Steam search brought more visits than the SNF page
- Pressing the green Steam button isn’t the end of making a game – promoting it is as important as finishing it
- I learned a lot about marketing and improved my video editing, both long and short forms
- having a Discord link in the demo will be mostly used be people/spammers to offer their services
- Just Fly will be released on December 14, 2026
The stats
Here are the game’s Steam stats over the Next Fest week. The first chart shows impressions vs. store page visits. It uses a log scale because the click-through rate (CTR) is around 1%. For the first three days of the festival, Steam displayed all games randomly to all users. After that, it displayed personalized lists. Impressions are expected to drop with personalized lists, because Steam shows each game only to players with matching interests. For Just Fly, they dropped by 71%, from 23,385 on day 2 to 6,791 on day 4.
The second chart shows visits, new demo players, and wishlists.
| Day | Event | Impressions | Visits | CTR | Wishlists | Total | Players |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 19 | SNF start, YouTube short video | 8,070 | 79 | 0.98% | 30 | 114 | — |
| Oct 20 | YouTube short video | 23,385 | 186 | 0.80% | 50 | 164 | 78 |
| Oct 21 | YouTube short video and short live streams on Steam | 14,624 | 106 | 0.72% | 25 | 189 | 63 |
| Oct 22 | New capsule, 2h live stream, and first day with personalized Steam feeds | 6,791 | 60 | 0.88% | 23 | 212 | 29 |
| Oct 23 | Prototyping a new game? | 5,290 | 50 | 0.95% | 13 | 225 | 51 |
| Oct 24 | Prototyping a new game? | 5,222 | 51 | 0.98% | 13 | 238 | 24 |
| Oct 25 | 3h live stream on Steam | 4,535 | 44 | 0.97% | 21 | 259 | 35 |
| Oct 26 | 4h live stream on Steam | 3,501 | 39 | 1.11% | 9 | 268 | 21 |
Just before the SNF, I started prototyping a new idea instead of polishing the demo. If it goes well, I will show it by the end of this year.
The SNF page wasn’t the only source of visits. It brought 617 of the 2,586 visits during the week, excluding bots. The rest came mostly from Steam search and direct navigation. Search grew the most: from 5 – 37 visits per day in the first four days to 105 – 298 per day in the last four. From day 5, it brought more visits than the SNF page every day.
What I tried
New capsule
I hesitated to hire an artist to make a capsule, and I decided at the last minute. So the new capsule arrived during the festival, and I replaced the old one on day 4. I will not make this mistake again. The capsule is the first thing people see, and it affects whether they click on the game or not.
With the old capsule, the CTR was 0.72 – 0.98%. With the new one, it was 0.88 – 1.11%. But Steam enabled the personalized feeds on the same day, so people that would like the game click more. So I can’t separate the two effects. My live streams had almost no viewers, so the capsule and the personalized feeds probably drove the increase.
YouTube Shorts
I posted one short video on YouTube per day for the first three days. The channel was brand new, with zero subscribers, and the Shorts have around 1,000 views each. I used the Steam’s UTM links, and they didn’t bring any traffic. All external websites together brought only 37 visits during the whole week, and 19 of them came from Reddit.
Live streams on the store page
I streamed on the game’s Steam store page on days 3, 4, 7, and 8, from short streams up to 4 hours long. On day 4, I also ran a Steam event with the stream. The streams had 100–300 impressions, but under five people watched each of them.
The How To Market A Game score
How To Market A Game compares your Next Fest results with hundreds of other games from the February and June 2026 festivals. The tiers depend on the wishlists earned during the fest: Bronze is under 1,000, Silver is 1,000 – 6,999, Gold is 7,000 – 9,999, and Diamond is 10,000 or more. Just Fly earned 184, so it is Bronze.
Their score uses the wishlist multiplier: wishlists earned during the fest divided by wishlists before it. For Just Fly, it is 184 / 84 = 2.19x. “Tripled” counts the total instead: (84 + 184) / 84 = 3.19x. It is the same result from a different baseline. So the common “SNF doubles your wishlists” is a multiplier of 1x.
The game size matters the most. The scatter plot at the bottom shows that games with more wishlists before the fest earn more during it. Impressions show the same gap: at the peak, Diamond games averaged over 100,000 impressions per day, and Just Fly got 23,385. The median wishlists multiplier in the Bronze tier is 0.61x, so more than half of these games don’t double their wishlists. Just Fly’s 2.19x is 3.59x that median. Small success :)
Conclusion and next steps
Is there really any conclusion here? The SNF tripled Just Fly’s wishlists, but new wishlists stopped with the fest. In the three weeks since, only 21 new wishlists came in, and 24 were deleted in total. Today, the game has 289 wishlists in total and 265 outstanding, almost the same outstanding number as on the last day of the festival.
Looking at the players vs. wishlists chart, maybe I should have added an exit confirmation dialog with an option to wishlist the game? I heard that people forget to wishlist a game after they play its demo. I also added a Discord link to the demo, but mostly people offering their services, like capsule art and trailer editing, joined it. So I am strongly thinking about removing it in the next update.
I have already implemented two new biomes for the full version (check the video below), and I need to playtest and polish the game more. I have also added full Steam integration: cloud saves, achievements, and leaderboards, including an in-game UI for leaderboards. The game still needs some tweaks to get “Full Controller Support” on Steam, like displaying the software keyboard, which has had issues in the Steam SDK for the last couple of months :(
Just Fly will be released on December 14, 2026. Don’t forget to try the demo and wishlist it if you like it! ;)
As you already know, I started prototyping a new game just before the Next Fest. We will see what comes out of it :) I even made a meme post on Reddit about polishing the demo for the Steam Next Fest , where nobody reacted to the “game” image ;)
