Why You Might Not Need Thousands of Steam Wishlists

Описание: How important are Steam wishlists for the success of your game? 🚀 In this video, we compare wishlists estimates to sales estimates for games on Steam and uncover why building your own marketing strategy is far more important than relying on the Steam algorithm to magically promote your game.

Why do we talk about ratios and not conversion rates?

It’s another one of those times when the game developer is the only person who knows how many people who wishlisted a game went on to buy it.

From the outside we can only estimate the number of Steam wishlists before launch and the number of sales after launch. A conversion rate is when one thing turns into another and would imply that every sale that we estimate is the result of a wishlist. But as we all know, not all sales on Steam are the result of a wishlist. Even on launch day, a player might buy the game without wishlisting it first and as we see in the video, some games get more sales than wishlists.

A wishlist-to-sales ratio simply compares the number of Steam wishlists a game has on launch day compared to the number of copies sold 1 week and 1 month after launch.

In this video you’ll learn:
✅ What Steam wishlist-to-sales ratio looks like for indie games
✅ How many wishlists are considered “enough” before launch
✅ Which types of games have higher & lower wishlist to sales ratios
✅ Why wishlists are only part of the bigger picture
✅ The role of marketing and community-building in turning wishlists into real sales
✅ Why the Steam algorithm alone won’t guarantee your game’s success

Whether you’re a solo developer or part of an indie studio, this discussion will give you practical insights on how to approach your Steam launch with realistic expectations and actionable strategies. Stop waiting for luck and start building visibility and trust with your players now.
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Chapters

0:00 - Introduction
0:31 - What is the Wishlist-to-Sales Ratio?
0:56 - The Boxleiter Estimate
1:40 - What research has already been done?
2:20 - The Steam Map - A Map of Every Game on Steam
2:32 - Our Research Methodology
3:02 - Focusing on the 1st Month After Release
3:45 - Do You Really Need 7000 Steam Wishlists?
4:39 - The Effect of Negative Reviews
4:57 - The Effect of a Game’s Genre
6:46 - Outliers: People Who Sold More Games Than Wishlists At Launch
7:21 - Nubby’s Number Factory
7:49 - Metal Garden
8:12 - Mini Cozy Room: Lo-fi & Ropuka’s Isalnd
9:12 - Digseum
9:34 - What Does It All Mean?
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