Last week’s Steam Next Fest had over 8,000 demos; now Valve has revealed the 50 most-played among them. The results aren’t surprising: there’s lots of friendsloppy casual co-op, incremental games continue to be popular, and players have by-and-large rejected games with overt generative AI use, with only four of the games among the 50 declaring AI use in development.
Here are some other factoids:
Among all 50 of these games, the only entry published by a traditional “blockbuster” publisher was Tropico 7, a Ubisoft affair [Oops, it’s actually a Kalypso Media affair].
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Teach My Little Sister How To Drive was one of the four games with AI disclosures. It leans heavily on an LLM-powered NPC which apparently cost its developer over $1,000 a day.
I’m not super surprised by the list, which you can find here, and which is topped by 1-6 player “asymmetric party game” Worst Class Ever. I’m not surprised because it really does capture the zeitgeist, but it’s nevertheless pretty eye-opening when you compare it to the kinds of games that dominated the event only five years ago. For example, this Reddit thread lists highlights like Norco, Death Trash, Sable, Unpacking and The Inheritance of Crimson Manor, all of which people still talk about and play (though I am still waiting for Death Trash to enter 1.0).
It’s hard not to see the outsize influence of Roblox and UGC in general on this list, which can sometimes be unappreciated by people who like to pay for games on Steam and read about them on PC Gamer. It’s possible that the kids who were reared on cheap smartphone software are responsible for the surge in freewheeling online co-op games with simple graphics, but whatever the case, 2026 feels very, very different to 2021.
