The 50 Most-Played Steam Next Fest Demos Include 7 Incremental Giochi, 4 AI Disclosures, and Only One Instance of Haystack Slop

Last week’s Steam Next Fest featured more than 8,000 demos, and Valve has now revealed the 50 most-played among them. The results are not surprising: there is plenty of friendsloppy casual co-op, incremental games remain popular, and players have by-and-large rejected games with overt generative AI use, with only four of the 50 declaring AI use in development.

• 7 incremental games, including 10 Million Pixels and Unharvest
• 15 lighthearted or comedic co-op games (aka friendslop) including Dude, Trust Me, Oar’Some Adventures, and Banana Airways
• 3 survival games including Frostrail, Never Be Alone and Arctic Drive
• 3 games that self-describe as “cozy” including Loftia
• 1 MMO in ArchAge Chronicles
• 1 haystack slop game

Among all 50 of these games, the only entry published by a traditional “blockbuster” publisher was Tropico 7, a Ubisoft affair.

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.

The list, which can be found here, is topped by the 1-6 player “asymmetric party game” Worst Class Ever. It really does capture the zeitgeist, but it is nevertheless pretty eye-opening when compared to the kinds of games that dominated the event only five years ago. For example, a 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 the writer is still waiting for Death Trash to enter 1.0).

It is 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 is 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.