With the postponement of GDC (Game Developers Conference) due to coronavirus heavily impacting indie game developers, George Keighley (creator and producer of The Game Awards and Gamecon) and Steam are putting together a Spring version of the Steam Game Festival. This is designed to put new and upcoming indie games into the spotlight that missed out on their chance to show what they have. Similar to the first Game Festival, this one will be on a larger scale and feature more than 40 games that people can download and test out on their own for free. The Spring Edition starts at 10 am PT and 1 pm ET on March 18th, and will go until the same time on March 23rd.

Surprise! @thegamefestival returns tomorrow to @Steam with 40+ new games you can play at home, which were originally set for GDC. This is the Spring edition of @thegamefestival pic.twitter.com/lD7LE509Ge

— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) March 17, 2020

The first Game Festival on Steam was held back in December 2019, along with The Game Awards, which gave people the opportunity to look at game demos for more than a dozen games. Only 14 games were able to be previewed, which allowed players to download them for free for 48 hours. While a GDC relief fund has been set up to help those indie developers who planned to attend GDC, the loss of this event is still another massive loss of exposure for the studios behind them. The exact games that are available at the festival are still unknown, but they will all be visible at the same time on March 18th.

For players that are interested in this festival, they will be able to log in to their Steam accounts on the main store page to find all the details on how to access the event. Another assumption of the event (since the time is greater than the first one) is that players will be able to experience games for a full five days instead of two. This event is not the only event that Steam is offering for the latter half of March amidst other events being postponed or canceled until further notice.