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Steam Wishlists to Sales: What Your Wishlist Count Really Tells You
A wishlist count tells you how many Steam accounts asked to be told when your game comes out or goes on sale. It does not tell you how many copies you will sell, and Valve says so in its own documentation: “there’s no formula to accurately predict sales from wishlists.” The most useful public number comes from Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo, who found a median of 0.15 first-week sales per wishlist for games that launched with more than 25,000 wishlists in the year to August 2025. Below is what Valve says a wishlist does, what Steamworks reports, and how far the published conversion figures can be trusted.
What a wishlist does, according to Valve
The Steamworks wishlist documentation is short and specific. A wishlist is a standing request for notifications, and Steam sends them at a handful of moments.
When Steam contacts your wishlisters
- Launch: everyone with the game on their wishlist gets an email and/or a mobile push notification, for an Early Access launch or a full release. Leaving Early Access for full release sends another one.
- Discounts of 20% or more: the discount has to cover the lowest-priced package and run for more than 8 hours. Discounting only a deluxe edition sends nothing.
- Cooldown: discount emails are limited to one every 2 weeks per game, and Valve can stretch that during seasonal sales.
- Demo: one notification when a free demo goes live. You choose the moment, up to two weeks after the demo release, and you have to press the button on the demo’s landing page yourself.
- Who receives them: only accounts with a verified email address, and some users switch these emails off.
Two things follow. Every wishlist is a person you can reach again without paying for an ad, and the number of times you can reach them is limited. A demo notification sent on a quiet Tuesday, or a 15% discount that triggers nothing, wastes one of very few chances.
What Steamworks shows you
The wishlist reporting page lists additions, purchases and deletions. Data arrives daily for the previous day. Each row carries a MonthCohort, the month the player added your game, so you can see whether last year’s wishlists are still buying. A breakdown by country sits in the Regional Sales report, and the conversion of each wishlist email appears under “View detailed wishlist breakdown” in the financial reporting site.
Watch deletions as closely as additions. A jump in deletions after you change the capsule, the price or the trailer is the store page telling you something.
On visibility, Valve says wishlists “can be an important factor in determining where your game appears on Steam,” and answers the question of a minimum wishlist count with one word: “No.” Its Coming Soon page documentation adds a point that should change how you plan: players who wishlist two years before release can be just as likely to buy as players who wishlist two weeks before, provided the game does not change much in between.
The published conversion figures
Steam does not publish an average conversion rate. Everything below is third-party analysis, from one named analyst, and each figure measures something slightly different.
GameDiscoverCo, October 2025
In The state of Steam wishlist ‘conversions’: 2024-2025, published on 17 October 2025, Carless looked at every Steam game that launched with more than 25,000 wishlists in the year to August 2025.
- The median was 0.15x: about 15,000 first-week sales for every 100,000 wishlists at launch.
- For games priced above $10 at launch, the median dropped to 0.10x.
- Removing adult games moved the median only from 0.15x to 0.14x.
- The sales figures are external estimates, and they count every first-week sale, including people who never had the game wishlisted.
Carless himself calls the idea of wishlist conversion as a reliable metric “near-fatally flawed,” and notes that results vary by 10 to 20 times between games.
GameDiscoverCo developer survey, April 2024
This one is older than 2025, so read it as background. In his April 2024 survey of more than 100 games launched since 2020, the median was 0.20x across all games and 0.17x for games with more than 10,000 wishlists. The same survey found that the median game’s first year grossed 3.16 times its first week, so week one is roughly a third of the first year, not all of it.
The 2020 survey and the “talked about” score
In a June 2020 survey of 50 developers, Carless found a median of 0.2 and noticed that conversion tracked how much a game was discussed outside Steam. The data is six years old, but the observation fits Valve’s own point that everyone wishlists for different reasons.
A worked number, not a forecast
30,000 wishlists at launch
At the October 2025 median of 0.15x, that is about 4,500 first-week sales. If your game costs more than $10, the 0.10x median gives about 3,000.
The 2024 survey found results from a tenth of the median to ten times it, so the honest range for the same 30,000 wishlists runs from about 450 to about 45,000. Use the median to sanity-check a budget. Never put it in a pitch deck as a promise.
What you can actually do with the number
- Measure velocity, not only the total. In the April 2024 piece, Carless found the best predictor was how fast followers and wishlists were growing just before launch. A count that has been flat for six months says less than a smaller count that doubled last month.
- Plan the emails. You get one demo notification, one launch email and discount emails no closer than two weeks apart. Put them on the calendar before you need them.
- Keep the game recognisable. Valve’s two-year point only holds if the game does not change much. If you pivot genre, the old wishlists were made for a different game.
- Tag your links. Steamworks UTM Analytics counts wishlists that happen within 72 hours of a click on a tagged link, so you can see which creator, post or newsletter actually produced them.
The store page is where the wishlist click happens, so that is usually the first thing to fix. Our guide on how to optimize your Steam page to maximize wishlists covers the capsule, the screenshots and the description. If you are planning a festival push, Steam Next Fest February 2027 has the dates and the demo rules.
These three games are not out yet. Castle-O plans its release for Q1 2027, Simple Football League Manager for 3 December 2026, and Forester lists itself as Coming soon, so every wishlist they collect now goes into their launch email.
Coming soon on IndiePump.space: request a key today
Coming soon
Want to see what your own wishlists pay out? Try the free Steam wishlists to revenue calculator: set your price and wishlist count and it shows launch week and the first year, after Steam’s cut, taxes and refunds.
How IndiePump can help
Every game on indiepump.space gets a free press kit page where more than 300 content creators can request review keys, and you decide who gets one. Give each creator a tagged link and their wishlists show up in your UTM report. For hands-on work on the page that collects the wishlists, see our Steam page setup service, or talk to us about your launch.
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