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Steam’s Game Festival coming back this summer, featuring all new games and curation

Valve is going to be handing out recommendations

Screenshot of indie game Dap, featuring a small, white creature in a swampland by a waterfall

We’re not long removed from the last Steam Game Festival, and the next is on the horizon. Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition is happening in June, featuring a little more oversight than previous editions.

All the details are shared on Steamworks, including how to register, and the criteria for eligibility. The event takes place over six days, from Wednesay, June 16, 2021, to Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021, allowing developers around the world share bite-sized versions of their games. To get a demo on the showcase, your project must be an upcoming game that’s set to release sometime after the festival, but before January 2022, and your game wasn’t on either the 2020 Steam Game Festival  or winter 2021 Steam Game Festival.

This time around, a curation team will be on hand, recommending specific games and demos, picking stuff out from the crowd using all publicly available information from the store page. “The Valve curation team looks at each store page,” reads the post, “including any screenshots, trailers, and description in order to determine which games we will be highlighting during the festival.”

The last one had over 500 demos available, from projects involving veteran developers and bright-eyed indie creators alike. Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Dap, and Loop Hero were a few that I checked out and enjoyed. Browsing makes for a genuinely lovely evening, now perhaps even moreso since discoverability is being tweaked.

Here’s the trailer for Dap:

You have until Wednesday, April 14 to register, if you’ve a demo you want people to play.