For three years now, at least since Valve renamed its classic Demo Festival, Next Fest has captured all of our attention. This week of free demos, trials, and early betas of a good list of games looking to grab a piece of the market has made headlines, and rightfully so. We’re not talking about a festival limited to small indies, but even big projects are available to try out. However, after the October Next Fest has closed and its most played demos have been seen, we have two news: multiplayers have triumphed and among them, a game inspired by League of Legends has taken the winner’s crown.
As you know, these lists, far from making clear future hits, since once they are released to the market, they will depend entirely on their visibility and player reviews, help us predict which games will be talked about in the coming months. In this case, the top 50 most played demos, at least as a whole, are varied, to say the least, but the top 3 are dominated by three multiplayer games.
The undisputed winner of the festival, as we mentioned, is a mix between a MOBA and a battle royale, promising fast-paced battles and aiming directly at esports. Supervive, which will seek a place in the market later this year, is clearly inspired by League of Legends and Dota 2, but adds to the mix several game modes, a good list of heroes with up to 16 characters to choose from, and a much larger battle map than its muses. In fact, this “open” map allows Supervive to play with mechanics that are rarely seen in the game, using transversal movement between platforms and falling deaths and environment to its advantage.
The two spots accompanying this top are as strange from each other as they are unique. Popucum has taken the second spot, being a cooperative adventure with an aesthetic that seems halfway between Astro Bot and Splatoon, where you must collaborate with friends to overcome obstacles. Finally, Gladio Mori is another multiplayer, this time a physics-based fighting simulator of close combat. The curious thing is that Gladio Mori has entered the list of the most played for the second time, the first being last April, where it earned a 97% positive rating.
The demos that aimed high did not succeed as much
With the release of Next Fest, players were met with two games that seemed to be set to sweep over the rest and yet, have ended up in places far from the top of the list. In this case, one of the games that seemed to perform well was Delta Force, that free shooter resembling Battlefield in scale and mechanics and aiming to be its direct competition in the market. In this case, Team Jade’s game has ended up in 28th place.
Another launch that started strong was Sand, an open-world multiplayer with base building mechanics whose twist lay in these same construction mechanics. Sand proposes that all players’ bases move around the map mounted on quadruped robots akin to Mortal Engines, earning it the 31st position on the table. This, in reality, does not mean that either of them will fail upon release, just that after a strong debut in the event’s early days, the player base barely grew compared to other titles more prone to success through word of mouth.
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