Steam Next Fest is upon us, and it's already being dominated by an open beta for PvP shooter Mecha Break. That's maybe not entirely in the spirit of what we generally consider a demo bonanza for smaller indie games, but Valve's own metrics are calling it one of the biggest games of the event.
The official Steam Next Fest page ranks Mecha Break's beta as the top game in the popular upcoming and top demos categories - that means it's top by "most wishlists" and "daily active users," respectively - and its top spot in the trending upcoming category is thwarted only by a delightfully charming-looking fishing RPG.
If you want hard numbers, we can head over to the concurrent player charts at SteamDB, which shows that Mecha Break reached a peak of 256,783 simultaneous players today. That makes it the fifth-biggest game on Steam in the past 24 hours, just behind Marvel Rivals and well ahead of venerable favorites like GTA 5, Rust, and Apex Legends.
But one area Mecha Break isn't doing so well is in the ol' player review scores. This demo is currently sitting at a "mostly negative" rating with just 33% positive reviews, and the complaints range from sluggish gameplay to an overlong tutorial and aggressive monetization. A lot of the negative reviews also come from the first day of the beta, when the game was suffering serious server issues.
It's clear that there's a lot of early interest in Mecha Break, but time will tell if those issues mecha break - uh, hm, sorry - make or break the game's long-term chances at success. Our own early impressions of Mecha Break have been quite positive, and there's an army of mech sickos out there looking for the next game to flock to.
Dying becomes a skill in this JRPG from the Danganronpa devs, and its Steam Next Fest demo is already Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.
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Dustin Bailey