The GameDiscoverCo Show

The next Steam Next Fest is going to be how busy?

Episode Summary

We talk the different structure and the amount of games currently lined up for October's Steam Next Fest, how making 'regular' trailers vs. short-form video influencer output differs, whether Xbox is going to be making Minecraft more commercially minded in the medium term, and how video games need to compete in the 'attention economy' with the inexorable rise of gambling.

Episode Notes

We talk the different structure and the amount of games currently lined up for October's Steam Next Fest, how making 'regular' trailers vs. short-form video influencer output differs, whether Xbox is going to be making Minecraft more commercially minded in the medium term, and how video games need to compete in the 'attention economy' with the inexorable rise of gambling.

Join Simon Carless & Chris Plante in the latest GameDiscoverCo Show as they look at these questions and more. Mentioned in this episode:

• Steam’s upcoming Next Fest (starting Oct. 19th) has its dev-only preview live. And reports say there’s a new interactive genre picker (using 2x ‘lead categories’ the dev picks) to help players choose, early on. (Also: currently >8,000 demos (!) queued for the fest - though that number will come down, as some games drop out late…)

• Veteran trailer maker Derek Lieu asks a key Q on YouTube: “Are game trailers ‘old news’ when one viral short [video] can make a game blow up?” (He looks at aspects of shorts (captions, voiceover) that differ from “a 60-90 second video crafted to sum up the game's experience/vibe”, and notes that most short-makers recut… the trailer!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_J8mTO3wZY

• More evidence Minecraft’s getting sharpened platform power? Tubefilter spotted a job ad which has a successful applicant “defending against competing platforms (Roblox, Fortnite/UEFN, Unity, Fab) through better developer experience, tooling, and enablement at portfolio scale.” (That doesn’t sound like cozy oldskool Mojang.) https://www.tubefilter.com/2026/09/30/microsoft-mojang-hiring-minecraft-creator-experiences/ (Minecraft also got a new head who was an ex-chief product officer at Reddit.)

• We’ve talked about video games getting more randomized rewards & divergent ‘runs’. And while games don’t come up in this NYT piece about ‘how everything became gambling’, the article underscores the fact that the attention economy is just getting ‘grabbier’. And games have to compete with gambling for eyeballs - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/magazine/gambling-prediction-markets-statistics.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GVE.SGsc.ybkSCbW6jYgK&smid=url-share

Also discussed: last week and this week's new Steam releases, what's new or upcoming for GameDiscoverCo Plus & Pro data users since last time, and Chris' surprise question of the week for Simon.