How many wishlists should a Steam game have at launch?

There is no official number. Valve says wishlists are not a factor in algorithmic visibility except on Popular Upcoming, and Steam emails wishlisters at launch. How To Market A Game recommends at least 7,000; its June 2026 survey of Popular Upcoming found a median of 13,270 wishlists. Multiplying by a first-week conversion range shows what a count is worth.

Last reviewed · SteamStats team

What the number is for

Wishlists at launch matter for two concrete reasons: Steam emails every wishlister when the game releases, and the Popular Upcoming tab on the store home page, the main exception Valve names to its rule that wishlists do not affect visibility, shows the most anticipated unreleased games. After launch, Steam's algorithmic lists respond to purchases and play rather than to wishlists.

  • Wishlists at launch: wishlist additions up to release day, minus deletions and purchases. This is the balance Steam's launch email reaches.
  • Popular Upcoming: a home-page tab of soon-to-release games. On 4 June 2026 Valve updated it to show the most anticipated releases of the coming month and pointed shoppers looking for niche releases to the Personal Calendar.
  • Personal Calendar: a personal list of new and upcoming games for each player, built from games that players with similar playtime have wishlisted. It left Steam Labs and became a full store feature on 23 October 2026, and its dedicated page shows eight weeks of releases.
  • First-week conversion: units sold in the first seven days divided by wishlists at launch. It turns a wishlist count into an expected number of sales.

What Steamworks says

wishlists are not a factor in your game's algorithmic visibility on Steam
Steamworks: Visibility on Steam
  • The exceptions Valve mentions include the Popular Upcoming tab. Wishlists still matter because wishlisters are emailed at launch, when the game leaves Early Access and when it is discounted by 20.00% or more.
  • A new game needs a public Coming Soon page for at least two weeks before release, and Valve asks for the page review request at least seven business days before the page should go live.
  • To appear on the Personal Calendar a game needs a visible Coming Soon page with a specific release date. Valve recommends setting that date at least 60 days ahead for the calendar page and at least three weeks ahead for the front page.
  • The calendar places games by their visible release date, so a date given only as a month or a quarter gives the calendar nothing to place.

Worked example: Pebblewick four weeks before launch

Illustrative inputs for Pebblewick, the fictional demo game by Hollow Fern Games: 18,000 wishlists 28 days before a 2 March 2027 launch, a steady 150 net wishlists a day, and a price of $14.99.

Pebblewick: from wishlists to a first-week range
StepCalculationResult
Wishlists at launch18,000 + 150 × 2822,200
First-week units, low22,200 × 0.102,220
First-week units, middle22,200 × 0.153,330
First-week gross, low2,220 × $14.99$33,277.80
First-week gross, middle3,330 × $14.99$49,916.70

The 0.10 and 0.15 ratios are GameDiscoverCo's 2025 medians for games priced above $10.00 and for launches above 25,000 wishlists. 22,200 wishlists is above the 20,000 or more that the top 30.00% of games had in How To Market A Game's June 2026 survey of Popular Upcoming, which puts it in the range seen on that list, though Valve publishes no cut-off.

The calendar rules give the dates. A specific release date visible by 1 January 2027 meets Valve's advice of 60 days for the calendar page; 9 February 2027 is the three-week mark for the front page; and the Coming Soon page has to be public by 16 February 2027 at the latest.

What one wishlist is worth in the first week

A target only makes sense next to what a wishlist brings. At the $14.99 price above and the gross-to-payout chain of the net revenue guide, where 56.74% of gross reaches the studio, one wishlist at launch is worth $0.85 in first-week net to studio at a 0.10 conversion and $1.28 at 0.15.

That is the number to hold against the cost of a wishlist. How To Market A Game's archived 2022 benchmark gave one marketer's experience of about one wishlist per $1.00 of ads; at that price a wishlist pays back in the first week only above a conversion of 0.12, and otherwise the rest has to come from later weeks and discounts.

Why the advice differs between sources

  • The list changed. How To Market A Game's 2022 benchmark, now archived, was built when Popular Upcoming was a ten-game list ranked by date, and some games reached it with about 5,500 wishlists. After Valve's June 2026 update the author kept 7,000 as the minimum, reported that fewer games were eligible and that many stayed on the list longer, and found on the day surveyed that the bottom 30.00% of games had 8,470 wishlists or fewer, the median game 13,270 and the top 30.00% 20,000 or more.
  • A new surface. The Personal Calendar recommends games player by player, so a smaller game can reach the right players without a place on Popular Upcoming. In one developer-reported case on How To Market A Game, Popular Upcoming gave 1,297,384 impressions at a 0.81% click-through rate and 10,538 visits, while the Personal Calendar gave 79,820 impressions at 33.83% and 27,001 visits.
  • Estimates. Public wishlist figures for other games are estimates, often derived from followers; How To Market A Game works with roughly 10 wishlists per follower and calls these charts estimates.
  • Conversion. A target count only means something next to a conversion range, and published medians range from about 0.10 to 0.22 first-week sales per wishlist depending on the sample.

Where to see this in your own data

The Wishlists view shows daily adds, deletes and net and today's pace against a usual day, read from your Steamworks wishlist report every 60 min on Indie, Studio, and Publisher. Before launch, the Store visibility view shows where the game ranks on Top Wishlisted and Popular Upcoming, checked daily on Indie, Studio, and Publisher. The forecast starts from wishlists at launch and a first-week conversion range until real sales arrive.

Wishlists and the forecast are part of Indie, Studio, and Publisher. The feature pages linked below show each view with the demo game.

Sources