Steam Next Fest runs October 19 to 26, and the Double Skunk demo is in it. A game only gets one Next Fest, as I wrote in August, so this is my one swing.

I have a hope for the week, and it is a modest one. I would like to end up in the top half of a very crowded room.

How crowded is it

The June Next Fest had 4,382 demos, according to GameDiscoverCo’s count. A year earlier it had 2,645. The room grew by two thirds in twelve months. Valve has not said how many are in the October fest, and I would not bet on a smaller number.

The whole store looks the same. SteamDB counted 19,008 new games in 2025, up from 14,111 in 2023. By December, nearly half of the 2025 games had ten or fewer reviews.

Now think about who has to find you in there. A streamer who plays one new demo on every day of the fest sees seven games. Seven out of last June’s 4,382.

What the top half looks like

Chris Zukowski runs How To Market A Game, and the site surveyed about 170 developers after the February 2026 Next Fest. It is self-reported, so treat it as a rough ruler. It is also the best public set of numbers I have found.

Games that walked in with under 1,000 wishlists earned a median of 322 from the fest. The game at the 70th percentile earned 485. Games that started with 1,000 to 9,999 had a median of 1,006. Nothing predicted the result better than how many wishlists a game already had.

Demos converted well once people were playing them. The median demo got about 16% of its players to wishlist the game, and the middle of the pack ran from 12% to 20%.

The June numbers from GameDiscoverCo point the same way. A game in the top 10% of Next Fest titles gained 121 followers on its Steam page. Followers are not wishlists, but the direction is the point. That is about 25% fewer than the top 10% got a year earlier, because more games means the same slice gets less.

So that is my ruler. I am walking in with about a hundred wishlists, which puts me in the under-1,000 group. Beating 322 would put me in the top half of that group. That is the line I am hoping to clear.

How I got ready

The demo went up on September 28, three weeks before the fest. In that same survey, games whose demo was up well before the fest earned more from it. It is a weak signal, but it costs nothing to follow.

The biggest piece of work since then is the tutorial. I rebuilt it after feedback. The first version put a hub tour, a primer, three locked practice hands and a thirteen-stop tour of the screen in front of your first real discard. I cut it down to one thing. Two hands of cribbage with a coach, the first guided and the second yours, then straight into your first match.

Testers found the rough edges too. They could not find the arrow that throws your two cards to the crib, so it is lit on the first hand and counts down on its own. They did not know when a consumable can be played, so the first match now says so. A Back button replays any line you missed.

The other big job was the table itself. Cribbage on a screen can feel like a spreadsheet with a deck of cards, and I wanted it to feel alive. Cards fly from the deck into both hands. A jack on the cut lands with a short hold. A run rings one rising note per card. Skip and Skat, the two skunks, act out every consumable, and every powerup has an animal with three little scenes of its own, rationed so a card shows up now and then and never more than once a hand. When two powerups pay off together, their animals can share a scene.

It is still cribbage underneath, played by the book. The animals are seasoning. There is a Table characters switch in Settings for anyone who wants a quiet table.

Then there is the part I am worst at. A marketer is sending keys to 600 streamers for me. Most of them want money before they will even consider looking at a game, let alone making content about it. I do not blame them. It is supply and demand. Thousands of games, a limited number of streamers, and the same seven days for everyone. The rest of my marketing story is in this post.

There are a lot of AI games

Double Skunk was built with AI, and so are a lot of games now. Sulka Haro’s census of about 53,600 Steam releases found that roughly one in three new games in 2026 discloses AI use. In Haro’s numbers, an AI-flagged game reaches 100 reviews at only about 55% of the rate of the rest, and that has not improved in two years.

The flag is blunt. It covers everything from one AI-made painting to a fully generated game. It is still a headwind, and I know it.

Haro also compared the disclosures of hits and flops. The median flop, Haro writes, is “an art-asset play and little else.”

That line is what I am betting on. Even where I was not the one who made a surface, every one of them is there on purpose. Everything was planned, reviewed and signed off on. The game’s repo holds more than 400 written design specs and nearly 2,800 test files. AI did not make that work go away. It moved the work into deciding and checking, and there was an immense amount of it.

I hope it shows.

If it goes nowhere

If Next Fest does nothing for me, I will be fine.

I did not start this to make money. I started it to learn how to use LLMs well. Somewhere in the middle of that, I found a new job in a slightly different career, cybersecurity instead of hands-on engineering. I am now giving a talk about this project to share what I learned. None of that was the plan.

The real point was a theory I have, that with the right workflows you can build anything. Double Skunk was my way of testing the boundaries of it. A cribbage game with hundreds of animal scenes, six languages and a weekly online challenge was a good place to look for the edge. Whatever the wishlist count says, the test already paid off.

Good luck

Good luck to everyone in Next Fest.

If you have a few minutes, try the Double Skunk demo and wishlist it, so Steam can tell you when the full game lands on November 4.

Double Skunk is built by one person figuring it out as he goes. It is a cribbage game with powerups, deck tells, and rivals who cheat. Play the free demo on Steam, and wishlist it so Steam tells you when the full game lands on November 4. The patch notes track what changes build to build.