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Success on a storefront as vast and varied as Steam isn't easy – ask the countless developers who are pumping product out onto Valve's digital library on a daily basis – and one metric used to determine potential success or failure has often been the number of people who 'wishlist' your game.
The logic is sound: if you get tens or hundreds of thousands of people adding your game to their list, there's a good chance it will find an audience when it eventually launches. However, that reasoning has been called into question recently, and many experts feel that a high wishlist count doesn't always translate to actual sales.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Game Republic's Investment Summit late last month, Cassia Curran of Curran Games Agency warned about relying too much on wishlist data when approaching a game launch:
"Wishlists can be inflated or not really convert. And there's definitely been cases where the developer has done a campaign to get wishlists from just anywhere, and there's a mistaken belief where this will actually convert to purchases."
Speaking on the same panel, Transcend Fund's Lirui Ding agreed that the number of wishlists alone cannot be relied upon to judge a game's fortunes. Other data points, such as Steam followers or a successful crowdfunding campaign, should be taken into account to give developers and publishers a more accurate picture of how their game will land. "If there are already lots of people who are willing to pay for something that hasn't even been made yet, that could be a very, very good indication," he says.
However, Ding adds that, while the magical wishlist count doesn't always guarantee success in 2026, publishers still use it to decide on which titles they pick up for distribution:
"One of the publishers told me specifically, 'I'm only looking at the companies who have made the top hundred wishlists – if they're not on the list, I'm not even talking to them'. But if you're talking to, for example, indie publishers, then they would be looking at things that are totally different."
Do you still use the wishlist feature to earmark games you'll buy, or do a lot of the titles you wishlist end up being ignored when they launch? Let us know with a comment.