This year’s Ukrainian Games Festival demonstrated that interest in Ukrainian game development continues to grow. During the UGF, 73 new projects from Ukrainian developers were presented to the audience, giving them the opportunity to attract players’ attention.
Steam users were also highly active. The festival’s page was visited approximately 1.9 million times, and the total number of views of UGF banners and other promotional materials exceeded 5 million.
Organizer Stepan Prokhorenko spoke with dev.ua about the results of the UGF, the collaboration with Steam, and the festival’s future development. In the interview, he also explained why the current format of the event gradually needs to change and what the Ukrainian Games Festival might look like in the future.
Record-breaking reach and new challenges for the festival
UGF 2026 was the festival’s largest edition to date in terms of the number of participants, as well as new releases, demos, and announcements. According to organizer Stepan Prokhorenko, Ukrainian developers have already seen the benefits of participating: having a game featured at UGF can generate significantly more Steam wishlist adds than a standalone presentation by the team itself.
However, the festival’s scale also poses a challenge for the audience itself. When nearly a hundred different projects are unveiled in a single day, it becomes increasingly difficult for players to spot a specific game and make sense of the flood of new releases. That’s why the UGF team is already preparing changes for the next festival. The organizers want to revise the participant selection process and their approach to promoting individual projects, although the details of the future system remain under wraps for now.
Another new feature of UGF 2026 was the inclusion of full-fledged game releases. Previously, the festival was primarily a platform for announcements and presentations of upcoming games, but this year it featured 23 Ukrainian game releases. Among them were Tukoni, The Sinking City 2 from Frogwares, and the Cost of Hope expansion for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 from GSC Game World, owned by Maksym Krippa.
To ensure that individual projects weren’t overlooked due to the large number of participants, the festival team manually adjusted the order of the games on the UGF page. This way, different releases received roughly equal visibility. According to Prokhorenko, this approach yielded tangible results for some developers. For example, sales of PROFITS 2167 by Marevo Collective exceeded the publisher’s expectations.
At the same time, simply being featured at the festival does not guarantee automatic success for every game. UGF served more as an additional channel for drawing attention to Ukrainian projects, the effectiveness of which can vary depending on the specific release.
A key factor in this year’s results was a global promotion by Steam. From August 17 to 20, a UGF banner was displayed on the platform’s homepage for users worldwide. The festival itself lasted longer, running through August 24.
In terms of the number of visits to the UGF page, the 2026 figure ranked second in the event’s history. The record is still held by 2025—when the festival received 2.4 million visits. For comparison, in 2024 this figure was 1.4 million, and in 2023—1.3 million.
However, in terms of total reach of promotional materials, this year’s festival surpassed previous results and set a new UGF record.