The 10 most popular Steam Next Fest demos include 2 RTS games and a 4X grand strategy

We used to complain that we were in a game demo drought, and now we complain that we're drowning in them. It's a good problem to have, but there genuinely isn't enough time to play all of the demos available during any given Steam Next Fest—the current one ends on Monday—so some prioritization is in order.

If you just want to know which demos are the most popular, Steam recently sorted the top 10 by most played. They are:

It's notable to me that there are two real-time strategy games—that forever «dying» genre—in the top three. Plus there's a new historical strategy game in the list, Millennia, which I hadn't heard of. Nice to see more competition for the Civilization series, whose territory is also being encroached upon by the upcoming Ara: History Untold.

We've also been pointing out our own favorite Next Fest demos throughout the past week, which include Tribes 3, Magical Delicacy, and Cryptmaster. The most recent episode of our podcast, the PC Gamer Chat Log, was about all the demos we've been playing this week, too.