June Next Fest has completely exploded with 5.4k games participating (Feb was 3.4k games, already a lot)... maybe devs are avoiding the October Fest because of GTA 6? It used to grow by like 200, 400, 600 games between each festival, jezz...
Now that performance is judged within the first 2 days, anyone with an existing community can probably stay in the algorithm, and the rest without traction just gets swept under the rug.
Third-party festivals have been affected too, I mean, last year I got 1.2k wishlists just from festivals alone, but recently I’ve been rejected from the last 5 I applied to. The only one I got into said they accepted 400 out of 2,000+ applications.
I know there are a lot of games made in 2 weeks with like 80% AI, and those get ignored anyway… but still, as a festival curator, you’re not going to manually check 2,000 submissions to see which ones fit the theme. You just pick like 30 per category and send automated rejection emails to the rest, I guess, right? no? what about 4k submissions next year?...
At this point, even players might start avoiding Next Fest during the first few days. It might make more sense to wait until day 3, when 80% of the “slop” has already been filtered out.
Personally, I can't postpone my own game any longer... so I'll be very happy and accept my 200 new future additions!!