Steam Next Fest has wrapped up–for now–and out of the thousands of game demos that were available to try, Bungie’s Marathon rose to the top of the list. According to Steam, it gathered the data and listed the games below by the number of unique players during Next Fest. While that metric does technically work, it does raise an eyebrow around the definition of a demo during Next Fest.

Bungie had labeled this preview of Marathon as a “Server Slam” test that was open to everyone for several days and was primarily designed to stress-test the game’s online functionality while providing feedback to the studio. Does that count as a demo, let alone a Next Fest demo? That’s debatable, given the origins of Next Fest, which sprang to life in 2019 as part of a week-long Steam Game Festival that was held in conjunction with The Game Awards.

The event originally promised a selection of time-limited game demos for upcoming games, with it eventually transforming into Steam Next Fest a few years later. The first Next Fest of the year has been criticized for being flooded with far too many demos, with users on the Steam Forums calling out developers for diluting the event with AI slop that drowns out legitimate efforts from other studios and publishers. To make things even more complicated, many of the Next Fest demos went live several days before the event kicked off–in an effort to gain some visibility–while other studios submitted older demos for Next Fest that had been active for several months already.

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