Timothy, Adam, and Jack wade through Steam NextFest 2026’s overwhelming catalogue of strategy game demos, discovering that most feel like “alpha investor pitches” rather than playable games, debating whether developers understand the difference between a vertical slice and a proof-of-concept, and questioning why a Twilight Imperium demo only lets you practice fleet combat without showing any actual 4X gameplay.
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This episode provides honest assessment of Steam NextFest’s current state, where hosts struggled finding demos that hooked them despite trying dozens of titles across multiple strategy subgenres. The conversation explores fundamental questions about demo purpose in modern early access culture, comparing today’s half-finished promotional builds to 1990s magazine demo discs that featured polished campaign slices from completed games, while highlighting rare successes like Demiurgos (a god game managing religious spread through idea tech trees) and failures like Atre Dominance Wars (removing all city building from a Heroes of Might and Magic-inspired game, leaving only combat tutorials). The hosts debate whether Steam should implement quality filters or guidelines for NextFest submissions, acknowledging that most developers create demos primarily to generate wishlist metrics for investor pitches rather than entice players, and question whether releasing unfinished demos does more harm than good for both developers losing potential customers and players wasting time on disappointing experiences. Throughout, the discussion balances sympathy for indie developers’ resource constraints against frustration that so many demos lack basic elements like sound effects, clear tutorials, or hooks explaining why players should care about yet another RTS when Beyond All Reason exists for free.
Critical Moves Podcast – Episode 70 Show Notes
Title: Steam NextFest 2026: The Good, The Bad, and The Unfinished
Hosts: Timothy, Adam, Jack
Episode Length: ~54 minutes
Episode Summary
Episode 70 of Critical Moves examines Steam NextFest 2026 through three hosts’ experiences playing dozens of strategy game demos, revealing a pervasive problem where most submissions feel like unfinished alpha builds created for investor presentations rather than player engagement. Timothy, Adam, and Jack explore what distinguishes a good demo from a bad one, comparing modern early access promotional builds to 1990s magazine demo discs that showcased polished slices of completed games, while debating whether Steam bears responsibility for implementing quality standards or providing developer guidelines. The conversation highlights standout successes. Demiurgos impressing Adam with its complete-feeling god game mechanics and Poseidon-themed religious spread simulation, Irezumi Defenders blending tower defence with RTS card mechanics compellingly, alongside disappointing failures like Atre Dominance Wars removing all city building from its Heroes of Might and Magic-inspired gameplay or Twilight Imperium offering only fleet combat practice from a massive 4X board game. The hosts confront uncomfortable questions about whether overwhelming players with hundreds of half-baked demos serves anyone’s interests, acknowledge that wishlist generation for funding often supersedes player satisfaction as demo objectives, and debate whether developers should delay NextFest participation until their games reach states capable of actually hooking potential customers rather than alienating them with frustrating, incomplete experiences.
First Impressions: The Alpha Pitch Problem
Overwhelming Quantity, Questionable Quality
Timothy opens by requesting simple first impressions, prompting immediate consensus about problems. Adam identifies prevalent patterns: “I’ve seen lots of idle games, lots of auto-battlers, and one of the rest were interesting ones.”
Jack expands on the deluge: “I felt like a lot of the strategy games this time were like roguelike strategy games or puzzle strategy games. Some of them were JRPG narrative strategy games. I didn’t see a whole lot of big names.”
Adam’s core frustration emerges immediately: “A lot of low-effort games I would say, but that’s also sometimes just developers’ first steps into game developing or they’re trying to build up their project over time. I don’t want to be too harsh on that either.”
The Magazine Demo Disc Comparison
Adam provides historical context revealing how far standards have fallen: “I’m old enough to remember when the demos were added to the magazines on the CDs. Usually what the developers did back then was that for example in the games with campaigns, they got free missions out of this campaign and put it on a demo disc and you got this feeling that you were already in the game. You could feel that they cut the working piece of a game.”
The contrast with modern demos: “When I played this Steam NextFest games, the issue is often I don’t play a game, I play the alpha investor pitch. That’s what I’m playing.”
Tim’s Defense and Clarification
Timothy distinguishes past from present contexts: “There’s a big difference between the demos back then in the magazines. When they were making the demo for those magazines, the full game already existed and they cut a piece out of that game to give you a little teaser so that you would go to the store and buy the full game. Whereas here, it is early access. We’re still developing this game and we’re putting together something that resembles a little bit as best we can. If you look behind the curtain, it’s all scaffolding and barely holding together because that’s what they have at that time.”
This raises the fundamental question: “Who is it for then? When you are a player, you would like to play some well-prepared chunk of game to get interested into it. If we get something like Atre Dominance Wars, it feels to me like it’s for investor pitching, not for the players to get involved into.”
Sound Design: The Silent Failure
Universal Lacklustre Audio
Adam identifies a pattern across nearly every demo: “Every single game that I played had lacklustre sounds and music. I do think part of that is that’s probably one of the last things you really polish and it can often be the last priority in a lot of these games.”
However, the impact proves severe: “I think a game with really good sound or really good music really lets you immerse into the game so much more. And I noticed how much it was lacking in the demos.”
Sound Effects as Silent Heroes
Adam emphasizes particular importance of sound effects over music: “I could get by not having music, but for me, sound effects are like a silent hero of each of this game. If they are not there for me, it’s really hard to focus on the game. I hate when I click the button and I don’t hear a response.”
He provides specific example: “I remember there was a game a couple of years ago called Age of Wonders and I bought it in early access and in the beginning it didn’t have any sound effects. When the units fight, you couldn’t hear the sword clinging and for me I had to stop playing this game.”
The Package Buying Defense
Timothy suggests sound effects might come from commercial libraries: “There are—I feel they’re being bought in packages.” Jack acknowledges this possibility: “It’s absolutely possible when it comes to game development. There are people making their music for their demos and there are people making their sound effects for their demos. There’s nothing wrong with that. If they decide to use a free sound pack, that’s fine so long as they do it well.”
Jack’s Professional Perspective
Jack, with his music and sound design background, offers nuanced view: “I try not to be overly critical, but there was absolutely times where I was playing these demos and I was personally thinking, ‘I wouldn’t have taken that direction with the music because that’s me and it’s my job to think about those things for different games.’ But there would be times where I’d be playing a game and I’m like, ‘This music is pleasant but also it’s kind of overbearing for the game that I’m playing or it doesn’t fit what I’m doing.'”
Atre Dominance Wars: The Missing Hook
High Expectations, Disappointing Execution
Jack expresses initial enthusiasm: “I was really looking forward to that. It was one I also immediately had on my download list.” The game marketed itself as Heroes of Might and Magic meets Spell Force from established developer Iron Lore.
However, the demo fundamentally disappointed: “Both of those games did something that this demo did not do. If you take Heroes of Might and Magic or Spell Force and you remove the immediate hook—which is in Spell Force that central castle where you’re building rooms or doing alchemy, or in the case of Heroes, especially the Olden Era demo we played at Steam NextFest, building a city with mechanics that are aesthetically pleasing—this demo didn’t have that hook.”
What Was Missing
Jack details the absent core systems: “At no point did the tutorial change over where it started saying ‘build a city.’ At no point did it become a city builder. At no point were you investing your resources. In fact, at no point in the two tutorial missions did you go and collect any resources like wood or other items from nearby areas.”
Instead, simplified mechanics: “What you would go to are mana pools that would improve your mana to spend on spells for combat. You could go to places and it would give you one of seven different resources that are specific to just your leadership skills. Everything you did in the world was representative of just having your next battle.”
The Menace Comparison
Jack draws parallel to recent Critical Moves discussion: “It reminds me a lot of the Menace episode we did. For Menace, the reason I was so harsh even though I really enjoyed that demo and was hooked was because we had a date coming up at the end of that week when we knew it was going to come out into early access. We’re saying we’re playing a demo, there’s no hook, even though it is a lot of fun, we don’t get to experience the RPG parts, we don’t get to experience the ship building parts.”
The crucial difference: “My problem with Atre is basically that they didn’t give you that hook in this demo. While they haven’t announced the release date, they just ran a crowdfunding campaign where they gave people a window for the release date. The game is coming out in Q2 2026, so within the next 2 or 3 months.”
Sound Problems
Jack identifies technical issues beyond missing features: “Some of the sound effects and animations really needed some work, especially whenever they would introduce new units to the battlefield that you hadn’t encountered before. Their sound was just wildly louder than anything else to the point that it hurt my ears.”
Question of Target Audience
Jack questions whether he simply misunderstood the game’s intent: “I can appreciate it’s a tutorial mission. I can appreciate that it’s a demo, but where’s the incentive to play this demo and want to buy the full game?”
Twilight Imperium: The Incomplete Mechanic
Massive Board Game, Minimal Demo
Adam expresses disappointment with the digital adaptation of beloved board game: “Since I’m a huge board game fan, I immediately downloaded Twilight Imperium because this is a huge game in terms of board gaming and I wondered what the digital version of it look like.”
Timothy seeks clarification: “Is it like the board game exactly copied into a digital version or is it a little bit adapted?”
Only Fleet Combat
Adam reveals the shocking limitation: “This is interesting because I downloaded the demo. I was like, ‘Okay, Twilight Imperium is a big game. I need at least one or two hours to play it.’ And the demo is only one mechanic of the game—that is fleet fighting—and it’s like a simulator of this mechanic and that’s it.”
The automobile analogy: “For people who didn’t play this game, Twilight Imperium is a huge 4X board game. In the perspective of what they’ve created digital version of and put in this demo, it’s like getting into the car and that’s it. You don’t know nothing. I don’t even know why they did it. Probably they had some deal that they had to push the demo out or something.”
Timothy’s Minimum Standard
Timothy articulates reasonable expectations: “You should at least be able to drive around a parking lot in a car. At least.” This captures the absurdity—showing one isolated mechanic from a massive interconnected system teaches nothing about the game experience.
Potential Reasoning
Timothy suggests possible motivation: “It can build up some hype though, I guess, which is maybe what they were trying to do.” However, the execution seems more likely to confuse or disappoint than excite potential players unfamiliar with the board game’s scope.
Demiurgos: The Standout Success
God Game Drought
Adam identifies rare genre entry: “This is a god game and kind of a 4X game at the same time. I don’t recall a good god game in quite a while to be honest.”
Religious Spread Mechanics
Adam explains the compelling concept: “Basically you play as a god need to spread your religion through all the continent. What I really liked about this game is one of the—this concept that basically your tech tree is like the different ideas from different religions that you can develop.”
Specific example illustrates depth: “For example, you can add to your faction—in some religion, children are being marked when they’re born. Here it’s a feature in a tech tree that every child is marked at their birth and it’s much harder for this child to change the religion in the future. That’s really cool. You build the ideas and then you see the outcome of what happens on the people.”
Polish Level
Adam emphasizes unusual completeness: “I often say that during Steam NextFest all the demos are half-baked or feel like alpha, and this game for me it feels at least like a beta. The UI is really well designed. It has this Paradox idea of hovering over things.”
Tutorial absence didn’t matter: “It lacks the tutorial but on the other hand you feel that all the mechanics are there. I really feel that this demo is one of the best I played for quite a while because it was so well developed and I can feel the game being released in a couple of months.”
Compelling Engagement
Adam’s personal experience proves the hook’s effectiveness: “I needed to stop playing for us to record this episode. So it says something.”
Ashes of Singularity 2: Old Ideas, New Paint
Beyond All Reason Comparison
Timothy opens with damning comparison: “When I was playing that I was thinking, ‘Why am I not playing Beyond All Reason instead?'”
He identifies the core problem: “It still has some of these really old-fashioned design ideas such as, ‘Oh, you can make a bunch of infantry or you can make a bunch of tanks and the tanks—there’s tanks that are good against infantry and there’s tanks that are good against other tanks and then you also have aircraft.’ And I feel like, ‘Well, I’ve played this in Command & Conquer in the early ’90s.'”
Tedious Resource Management
Timothy describes frustrating gameplay loop: “I spent most of my time running around trying to control nodes and then build on the resources on those nodes and then go to the next node and build on those nodes. There’s something like 50 nodes on a small map for one versus one. You’re spending most of your time just running around capturing nodes.”
Combat proves anticlimactic: “Then there’s a big confrontation with the enemy. You send your big army to the enemy army. They pew pew each other and then the bigger army wins and then that’s kind of the end of the game.”
Supply Mechanic Critique
Timothy questions thoughtless tradition: “They also have the supply mechanic. At the beginning of the game you have a lot of supply—like 30 supplies—so you don’t have to worry about it at all. Then suddenly you’ve built your army and then you have to build a lot of supply buildings.”
His philosophical objection: “I was thinking, what is the purpose of this? What fun does it serve to have this? It’s just an additional mechanic that doesn’t really do much. You just have to—oh, I’m nearing the supply limit. Okay, I build an extra house. Oh, now again I’m nearing the supply limit. I have to build an extra house. It doesn’t really do anything. There’s no strategic decision behind it. It’s not a fun thing to do.”
The Warcraft One Problem
Timothy identifies cargo cult design: “I feel like, ‘Well, Warcraft 1 did this in 1994. That’s how all of these other RTSes have been doing it since. So, okay, I guess we’re also doing this now.'”
Visual Quality Versus Substance
When asked if it looks good, Timothy acknowledges: “Yeah, it looks good. The units do feel okay. When the units fire and so on, that looks nice. The projectiles look nice. The map looks pretty decent. In some ways it looks better than Beyond All Reason. The maps look very well detailed.”
However, he notes missing elements: “The sound was not really there. There was no interesting music or anything, but that could come later.”
His conclusion emphasizes need for innovation: “Bring me something to be excited about. It can even be a feature. It can be an element. It can be something to get me excited about. Otherwise, I mean, there’s so many other games out there to play.”
Spaceslog: Potential Buried in Frustration
Promising Premise
Jack describes initial appeal: “It was basically like—I don’t want to say a prison architect, but it was very much like FTL, but you start off—it’s like the opening of The Expanse is what immediately got me.”
The setup intrigued him: “You had to choose three out of six or eight pre-generated characters that it would make a seed from each time and then it would randomly generate a world of a seed for the save file. You had to choose three of them and they would start off in an escape pod where they were running out of oxygen and their communications—they had no way to communicate outside of their transponder.”
God Game Indirect Control
Jack explains the management philosophy: “The thing is is that the game—I’m not going to say that it’s overly difficult, but it’s one of those games where you don’t get to directly tell the Sims what to do. You have to motivate them by making something. It’s almost like a god game in the sense that instead of actually telling them what to do, you’re just marking resources as accessible so that they know they can access it and then giving them the idea of building blueprints in the ship or expanding it so that they will do it on their own time.”
Pacing Problems
Jack identifies major frustration: “Even on three times speed, you were sitting there for minutes at a time waiting for them to wake up when they would go to sleep randomly. When all three of them decided to go to sleep, I had it on three times speed and I’m watching them. I’m sitting there watching them sleep while nothing is progressing in the game.”
Lack of clarity compounded issues: “I also didn’t get an impression of what time it actually was that they were going to be going to sleep because it’s also set in space. You just met these Sims. I don’t know what their sleep schedule is or how I’m supposed to define what part of the clock they’re going to sleep at. They don’t tell you those things.”
Tutorial Failures
Jack describes cascading confusion: “The game just did not give a whole lot of directions in general. For the first 10 minutes I was playing the game, I was trying to get them to grab resources and I didn’t understand initially in the game where they get the resources from.”
The resource catch-22: “I’m clicking through menus telling them to build things, asking them to pick up the coins on the ground when they said they don’t have any storage to pick anything up. ‘Okay, I don’t have any resources to build any storage to be able to haul anything or pick up or clean up the floor. I can’t build anything because I don’t have any resources. I can’t collect resources because I don’t have storage. I don’t know what to do.'”
Discovery through accident: “I backed up with my mouse wheel and I found out that outside of the spaceship, just outside of the actual screen that you can see at that time, there’s asteroids that you can tell them to go mine to get resources.”
Further complications: “I would watch them break the asteroid and then they would come back to the ship and then I would tell them to build something with the materials that I saw the asteroid dropping and then the thing wouldn’t get built. I would look back at the asteroid and they left the resources there. They just never picked up the stuff from the asteroid.”
Unintended Consequence
Jack identifies the demo’s backfire: “What it really made me want to do is for the first time in years, it made me want to redownload FTL and play that because I barely remember anything about FTL outside of the core gameplay loop. I just didn’t play enough FTL and it made me want to go back and play that. That’s not a great thing for a demo.”
Adam captures this perfectly: “If a game is created in such a way that encourages you to play the other game, maybe that’s something wrong.”
Potential Recognition
Despite frustrations, Jack sees promise: “I think the game could absolutely be very fun in the future and I saw the potential in it. I think that with a little bit more work there and as long as I put some more time into it, I think it could be so fun. I could think it could be another Rim World where the entire focus is just on expanding your ship.”
What Makes a Good Demo?
The Wishlist Metric
Timothy explains the business reality: “For a lot of game devs, wishlist is a huge thing. Steam wishlist. How many do you have on the wishlist to get funding? Because wishlist you show that to investors being like, ‘Okay, we will be able to translate this many wishlists into this much sales.’ It’s like a promise of future rewards.”
This drives demo strategy: “When you make a demo, often times what you’re trying to do is get people to wishlist after playing the demo. That’s kind of the whole point of it.”
The Hook and the Cut
Timothy articulates ideal structure: “If you’re looking to make a demo, give a taste of the game indeed and cut it right off where you’re at a point of like, ‘Oh, I would like to play one more level. Oh, I would like to continue with this a little bit more.’ Have fun and then cut it off at just the right time where people want more of that fun and then they will wishlist it for sure.”
Two Demo Philosophies
Jack describes internal studio discussions revealing alternative approaches: “Internally at my studio, we’ve discussed it when we’re talking about our demo. We talk about whether or not we’d like to do a vertical slice or if there’s some way that we could perpetually support that kind of thing.”
The strategic choice: “You either have a demo you play once that cuts off right before the good part so you immediately wishlist it so that when it does come out you can play the rest of that, or you have a demo that acts as an individual separate product that you do become satisfied by but you know because of how good the demo is that the full game is just going to have even more of that goodness. It’s like getting to play the free version now and then the paid version later is just going to contain hours more of that complex awesome content.”
Jack’s Criticism Framework
Jack explains his evaluative approach: “I try to be reasonable and only be harshest on the games that have an announced release date or a release date very soon following that NextFest. If the demo I play is not representative of the game I think the store page is showing me or if I’m playing a demo and not enjoying it for a number of reasons, I’m trying to give that criticism as quickly as possible and efficiently as possible to a developer who has a very soon release.”
The Finished Enough Standard
Jack argues for minimum completeness: “If your game is coming out soon, it doesn’t need to be 100% finished or polished, but if you were going to release a game on a console and have a dev kit sent to you by the console manufacturer and you were with a publisher, your game would need to be finished months before you could even release it or have a release date announcement.”
His principle applies universally: “Whether or not you’re releasing tomorrow or right when the Steam NextFest ends or next year, your game should probably be at a finished enough point by this point. Your demo still has to be some kind of hook or vertical slice that’s meaningful of the actual content in your game.”
Should Steam Implement Guidelines?
Adam’s Proposal
Adam questions platform responsibility: “I don’t know if Steam gives the developers some guidelines about the demos. What should be included in there? Maybe some short video for developers how to prepare the demo for people to get in, to play them.”
His frustration with current state: “At this point when I play—I haven’t spoken about a couple of games I played during this Steam NextFest—when I see the game, open the game and I see a button ‘play the game’ and I don’t know even what to press and there’s some things happening in there and there’s no info, half the music is gone, sound effects are not there, but I can see that someone put lots of work into this. I feel there should be some guidelines provided by the platform for the developers to at least try to make it as good as it could be.”
Resource Constraints Reality
Adam acknowledges developer limitations: “Of course for some indie developers it’s really hard and expensive to prepare the demo. But again, as Jack said, you could be only on one Next Fest. So maybe you should push it to the next one. Maybe the demo is not for you at this point. Maybe you should try different type of advertisement if you cannot put any part of the gameplay that’s hooking.”
The Harm Calculation
Adam questions whether bad demos serve anyone: “Of course we cannot push developers to make good demos, but on the other hand, if we get hundreds of games that are half-baked that are on the level of high concept games, I don’t know if it’s a direction we should head into at this point.”
He frames the mutual damage: “It’s not beneficial for you as a customer because basically you lose interest into the game and it’s not beneficial for a company because you lose a client. So it’s not beneficial at all to release something like this alpha slice of some gameplay features because it may do you more harm than not.”
Timothy’s Filtering Concern
Timothy raises algorithmic challenges: “I think it’s on purpose so that people really go into random games so that there is no filtering. Because if you start filtering too much then some games just don’t get touched at all and don’t get any exposure at all.”
This creates the current dilemma—Steam NextFest democratically floods players with hundreds of demos hoping random discovery benefits unknown developers, but the volume and inconsistent quality exhaust players before they find worthwhile games.
Other Games Mentioned
Irezumi Defenders
Adam’s enthusiastic recommendation: “It plays as a mixture of tower defence and RTS because you move your cards but at some point you realize that cards are basically units that can be attacked and there are other cards who are going to your cards and destroying your cards. It works really well. I was really grasped by the gameplay. I played through all the demo.”
The Magic: The Gathering inspiration: “It had this really clever idea about what they wanted to take from card games. In Magic the Gathering there are boosters and this game you also get boosters and from boosters you get cards that you then use at your base.”
Solar Wave
Timothy describes the idle space game: “It markets itself as a space expansion game but an idle one where you don’t have to micromanage your fleets. Basically you go from solar system to solar system to conquer it and you build out mining facilities, you build out settlements, you colonize. There’s a tech tree because of course there is. And you don’t have to micromanage your fleets. In fact, you don’t manage your fleets at all. It all happens automatically.”
However: “I like that sort of setting. I like the idea behind it. I don’t know how far they’re going to take it. As of this moment, it did get quite dull quite quickly. A lack of strategic depth, I would say, and it became tedious.”
Battlestar Galactica
Timothy acknowledges strengths: “I was a fan of the TV show. The setting is cool. The visuals were well done and the atmosphere that it created was okay.”
But finds gameplay lacking: “The gameplay itself, it’s a bit of a tower defense game where there’s waves of enemies and you have to survive long enough and you have to choose which of your units attack which units. Maybe I’m not the target audience. I find that a little bit simple.”
Townsfolk
Timothy’s casual experience: “It’s like Civilization 6 where you try to build combos by building districts but you’re only doing the districts. It did feel a bit like a browser game because of how simple it was. I felt like this game maybe came out 20 years ago on Newgrounds as a browser game.”
Mechanics described: “Your typical try to create combos by building certain tiles next to others but not the bad ones. There’s a bunch of different resources like humans and food and work and faith and money. You try to scale up and you unlock some tech.”
Verdict: “It was fun. I enjoyed it. It was okay. Very casual. Not huge or anything.”
City States Medieval
Jack’s immediate rejection: “I almost shouldn’t even mention the game. I ended up closing it before I progressed in it at all. The moment I loaded in, it looked like I was signing myself up for another Empire at War. It looked like it came out the same year as Empire at War.”
His advice: “I would 100% recommend that they just take some time and work on the UI, especially if they’re going to try to get me hooked into playing another Empire at War that comes out in 2026.”
Port Authority
Jack mentions discovering this after recording, suggesting continued interest in finding good demos.
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Episode Verdict
This episode captures Steam Next Fest 2026’s fundamental crisis—an overwhelming flood of half-finished demos functioning as investor pitches rather than player engagement tools, creating exhausting experiences for hosts who genuinely wanted to discover exciting new strategy games but instead spent hours clicking through “alpha concept games” lacking basic elements like sound effects, clear tutorials, or hooks explaining why players should care. The conversation’s most valuable contribution emerges from distinguishing what makes effective demos in modern early access culture versus 1990s magazine demo discs, with Timothy correctly noting completed games could afford polished campaign slices while work-in-progress early access builds inevitably feel scaffolded and incomplete, yet Adam persuasively arguing that releasing unfinished demos during limited Next Fest windows does more harm than good for both developers losing potential customers and players wasting time on disappointing experiences. The specific game discussions illustrate these principles—Demiurgos succeeding by feeling “at least like beta” with complete UI, engaging god game mechanics managing religious spread through idea tech trees, and polish suggesting near-term release viability, while Atre Dominance Wars fails catastrophically by removing all city building hooks from its Heroes of Might and Magic-inspired gameplay, leaving only combat tutorials that provide zero incentive for wishlist conversion despite launching crowdfunding campaigns and announcing Q2 2026 releases. Jack’s Spaceslog experience encapsulates the episode’s core frustration perfectly—seeing genuine potential in an FTL-inspired ship management sim while simultaneously finding it so poorly tutorialized and pacing-compromised that it made him want to just play FTL instead, demonstrating how bad demos actively drive players toward established competitors rather than converting them to new titles. The hosts’ debate about whether Steam should implement quality guidelines or filtering systems reveals tension between democratizing exposure for unknown developers versus protecting player time from endless half-baked submissions, though Timothy correctly identifies that excessive filtering would harm discovery while the current system exhausts players before they find worthwhile games. Most importantly, the episode establishes clear demo evaluation framework applicable beyond Next Fest—effective demos must hook players with core gameplay loops even if incomplete, should cut off at moments generating “I want more” rather than “I’m confused/bored,” and fundamentally must recognize that wishlist generation requires player satisfaction not just exposure, making polished vertical slices vastly more valuable than comprehensive but broken feature showcases.
Next Episode: Heart of the Machine 1.0 — Narrative Strategy, Time Loops & the Future of Arcen Games (Ep.71)
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