Your Steam wishlists may be worth half what they were

#shipping #steam #wishlists #launch

A Steam wishlist may buy you fewer launch sales than it used to. In a new analysis of his reader survey, Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game found that games launched from 2023 to 2025 sold about half as many units in their first month, per launch wishlist, as games launched from 2020 to 2022. He adds that the range is wide, so treat “half” as a rough guide rather than a rule.

That matters because many of the rules of thumb solo developers use to plan a launch were set with older data. Zukowski’s own benchmarks page, built on a 2020 study attributed to Simon Carless, puts median first-week sales at 15% to 25% of launch wishlists, depending on how many wishlists a game has. In a 2020 GDC talk, publisher Mike Rose suggested multiplying wishlists by 20% to 30% to estimate first-week sales. If your forecast leans on numbers like these, it was built for a different market.

The data, briefly

Zukowski looked at 160 Steam games from his sales survey, where developers upload their own Steamworks reports. Of those, 34 launched between 2020 and 2022, and 126 between 2023 and 2025. He left out 2026 launches because they haven’t had as many months on sale yet.

The measure is simple: units sold in the first month after launch, divided by wishlists at launch.

There are three caveats. The data comes from developers who chose to submit it. The earlier group is small, at 34 games. And individual games vary a lot, so your result could sit well above or below the average.

Why it might be happening

Zukowski calls it wishlist inflation. Since about 2020, developers have chased wishlists harder through Steam Next Fest and third-party festivals. He argues that makes the average wishlist cheaper to get and less likely to turn into a sale. He points to other factors too:

Valve has made wishlisting easier, so for some players a wishlist works more like a bookmark.
Festivals spread wishlists across more games, and he suspects festival wishlists convert worse.
More developers now know wishlists matter, and more of them take part in Next Fest.

Steam is also more crowded than it was. SteamDB counts about 14,000 releases in 2023 and about 21,000 in 2025.

Not everyone sees the same decline. GameDiscoverCo’s study of 2024 and 2025 launches put median first-week sales at 0.17 times launch wishlists for games with more than 10,000 wishlists. It said it doesn’t think conversion is falling, just that more games are competing for the same players. The two studies measure different things: GameDiscoverCo uses its own estimates of first-week sales, while Zukowski uses developer-reported first-month sales. They agree on one point, though. Results vary hugely from game to game.

GameDiscoverCo’s study also hints at what separates the games that convert well from those that don’t. The worst converters had spent much longer on Steam before launch, 411 days on average against 214 for the best, and had lower early review scores, 67% positive against 91%. A store page that sits for years keeps collecting wishlists, but some of those players may have moved on by launch day.

Wishlists still predict sales

The good news in Zukowski’s data is that wishlists still rank games by sales almost as well as before. He measured this with R², a score from 0 to 1 for how closely one number tracks another, where 1 is a perfect match. On a log scale, total wishlists against sales scored 0.77 for games launched in 2020 to 2022, and 0.72 for 2023 to 2025. The two trend lines are nearly parallel. The newer one simply sits lower: each wishlist is worth less, but more wishlists still means more sales.

He also tested wishlist velocity, meaning how many wishlists a game added in the 30 days before launch. Across all 160 games, velocity alone scored 0.72, slightly below total wishlists at 0.73. Combining the two nudged it up to 0.75, a gap small enough that he puts it down to noise. His conclusion is that total wishlists are still the number to watch.

What to do with this

Re-run your launch forecast. If you planned with an older conversion rate, halve it and see whether your plan still works. Using illustrative numbers: if you expected 20,000 launch wishlists to turn into 4,000 first-month sales, plan for nearer 2,000, and check that still covers what you need.

Watch the total, not the daily graph. Recent velocity didn’t predict sales any better than the running total, so there’s no need to refresh your wishlist chart every morning.

Keep collecting. Zukowski’s advice is to keep gathering wishlists rather than give up on them, including the ones a Steam Next Fest demo brings in.

Be cautious with your launch date. If the revised forecast falls short of what you need, more time on your store page and another festival before launch may be worth it.

Add your data. The survey is still open, and every submission makes the numbers more reliable for everyone.

Should you care?

You are	Our verdict
Pre-launch, with a wishlist count	Re-forecast now with a lower conversion rate, but don’t overhaul your launch plan on one study alone.
Already launched	Compare your first-month sales per wishlist with these findings, and consider submitting your data.
Without a Steam page yet	Aim for more wishlists than the old targets suggested, and get your page up early.

Sources

DEV Community