How many wishlists does Steam Next Fest bring?

It depends mostly on a game's wishlists before the fest. In How To Market A Game's survey of the February 2026 edition, games with under 1,000 wishlists the day before gained a median of 322, games with 1,000 to 9,999 gained 1,006 and games with 10,000 to 99,999 gained 5,215. Next Fest runs in February, June and October.

Last reviewed · SteamStats team

Definitions

  • Steam Next Fest: a week-long Steam event, held three times a year in February, June and October, where unreleased games offer free demos. Players try the demos and wishlist the games they like.
  • Press Preview: a period before the fest that includes every registered game, whatever the state of its demo. Press get no special access to the store page or the demo.
  • Demo: a separate App ID linked to the full game. It shows as a button on the game's store page, can have its own store page, and lets demo players write user reviews, but it has no Community Hub of its own.
  • Wishlists before the fest: the game's wishlist balance the day before the fest starts. The survey groups games by this number.
  • Wishlists gained: wishlists added to the full game during the fest week, as reported by the developers who answered the survey.

What Steamworks says

  • Each edition is open to unreleased games that have never joined a Next Fest before; a game can take part in one Next Fest only.
  • The game needs a publicly playable demo by the time the fest begins, and it cannot release before that edition ends. Only games with released demos appear in the fest.
  • Valve asks for the demo build to be submitted for review no later than five weeks before the fest if the demo goes out before Press Preview, and no later than three weeks before if it goes out before the fest starts. It encourages releasing the demo at least half an hour before the start.
  • The October 2026 edition ran until 26 October at 10 a.m. Pacific. The next editions listed by Valve are 22 February to 1 March 2027 and 14 to 21 June 2027.
The intent behind Steam Next Fest is to give visibility to all participating titles
Steamworks: Steam Next Fest

Worked example: Pebblewick in the February 2027 edition

Illustrative inputs for Pebblewick, the fictional demo game by Hollow Fern Games: 4,200 wishlists the day before the fest of 22 February 2027 to 1 March 2027, with a demo that goes out before Press Preview and a launch on 2 March 2027, the day after the fest ends.

Pebblewick: wishlists after the fest at the survey's results for its band
Survey resultWishlists gainedWishlists after the festGain on the starting balance
Bottom 30.00% gained at most5494,74913.07%
Median1,0065,20623.95%
Top 30.00% gained at least1,7225,92241.00%

Because the demo goes out before Press Preview, the build has to be submitted for review by 18 January 2027, five weeks before the start; for a demo released after Press Preview but before the fest the date would be 1 February 2027. The launch on 2 March 2027 respects the rule that a game cannot release before its edition ends, and since a game joins only one Next Fest, this edition is the game's single chance.

The range in the table is wide, and the spread between the survey's bottom and top 30.00% is the honest way to plan with it. The days after the fest show whether the gain holds, and the launch email the next day reaches everyone still on the list.

February 2026 benchmarks by wishlists before the fest

Wishlists gained during Steam Next Fest, February 2026, How To Market A Game survey
Wishlists before the festGamesBottom 30.00% gained at mostMedianTop 30.00% gained at least
0 to 99971179322485
1,000 to 9,999605491,0061,722
10,000 to 99,999362,5845,2159,633
100,000 or more79,98912,88227,661

The survey received 182 responses from games in the February 2026 fest; most of its tables use 170 to 174 games after removing duplicates and impossible values. The author found the strongest correlation between the wishlists a game had before the fest and the wishlists it earned during it, with a Spearman coefficient of 0.825.

Why Next Fest numbers differ between sources

  • Each edition is different. The same survey after the February 2025 fest, now archived, had 208 responses, about 9.20% of the 2,244 participating games, and higher medians: 462, 1,513, 6,360 and 23,731 for the four bands.
  • Self-reported samples. Developers choose whether to answer, and the largest band had only seven games in February 2026, so a single result moves its median.
  • Starting point. In the February 2025 survey, no respondent that entered with fewer than 1,000 wishlists earned enough during the fest to leave the lowest tier, which ends at 999 wishlists earned.
  • Estimates for other games. Trackers that do not have a game's Steamworks data estimate wishlists from followers or other public signals, which gives different medians from a survey of actual reports.

Where to see this in your own data

The Calendar & festivals view places each Next Fest on the same timeline as your launch date and discounts, and marks whether each game is eligible. During the fest, the Wishlists view shows adds by the hour against a usual day, read from your Steamworks wishlist report every 60 min on Indie, Studio, and Publisher, so the fest's lift and the level afterwards are visible day by day.

The Calendar and Wishlists feature pages linked below show both views with the demo game.

Sources