An indie developer who claims to have had only three people playing their game a week ago is now celebrating being one of the highest-played demos in Steam Next Fest.
Steam Next Fest is one of the best times of the year to be a PC gamer if you ask me, as a ton of upcoming PC games and upcoming indie games drop demos. This month's Next Fest event gave us some fantastic demos for heavy hitters like Marvel Cosmic Invasion and out-of-nowhere surprises like Crashout Crew (and bangers made out of bad franchises like Bubsy 4D, for the true sickos). But most importantly, Next Fest can be a great time for indie developers to get eyes on their game and a better chance at hitting big.
One of the biggest games of Steam Next Fest was Desktop Defender, an idle game that effectively has a game of Asteroids playing in the bottom corner of your screen while allowing you to do whatever you're doing on other tabs (I'm playing it right now, don't tell my editor). The only input you need is to let the numbers go up and select some upgrades every now and again.
1 week ago we had 3 players, today I got this e-mail.Thank you all so much ♥️ pic.twitter.com/AcG7Q9ltXiOctober 20, 2025
Now that Next Fest is over with, developer Conradical Games made a post on Twitter showing a message from Steam saying that Desktop Defender was one of "the most popular demos in this edition of Next Fest," and will be featured in the Next Fest most-played demo roundup.
The developer said, "1 week ago we had 3 players, today I got this e-mail. Thank you all so much."
During Next Fest, Conradical Games posted an update to Desktop Defender's news page showing its demo had almost hit 1,000 concurrent players, with SteamDB listing it as the 1,375th most wishlisted game
