Don’t memorise Steam, learn how it works

In June, Valve threw a year of release planning in the bin with a single move, and most developers still have no idea how it works. It was not even new. Personal Calendar had been sitting in Steam Labs since October 2025. The Popular Upcoming changes had already been talked about a lot among indies around January and February.

The threshold for getting into Popular Upcoming went from about 7k wishlists to 100k, a 15x jump overnight. Valve’s reason was “acting on player feedback, to better capture next month’s most anticipated releases”. That shelf is not the true indie shelf any more, it is closer to a mobile style wishlist top chart. When we heard it we all wondered whether we had been put out of work overnight. Most of us went into “we’re finished, organic reach is dead, we’re moving to mobile” mode. I had also just discovered Jestr when I first heard it, and I sent a friend the “Ah shit here we go again” meme.

Meanwhile Valve brought in Personal Calendar at the same time, and the calendar starts carrying you two months before release and carries you for another month after it. That is nearly 90 days of visibility, but I still recommend announcing 1 month out, because 2 months is a long time for an indie, it restricts how much you can manoeuvre and it can drive you into a wall on an important change. You lose a month of calendar visibility, but you gain the chance of never having to move your date. The place where setting it early really works is games with no community and low wishlist velocity.

That shelf is on the front page, higher up and with far less friction. To get into Popular Upcoming the player had to go and click that tab, whereas the calendar looks at the player’s own wishlist, follow list and play history and puts the game in front of them saying “people who play like you wishlisted this”. One example explains the difference. One game got 10k visits from 1.3M impressions in Popular Upcoming, and 27k from 80k impressions in the calendar. So impressions fall 16x while visits triple, because the calendar puts the game in front of the right guy.

According to GameDiscoverCo, even a small horror game with a 1k list managed to double it in two days. Another game being tracked was in the 300-500 wishlists a day band, and after the change it went up to 5-6k, and on the day it hit the front page it saw 10k.

But the texture of these wishlists is a bit different from normal. The same game took 100k extra wishlists and only 1.9k followers. Normally you would expect something between 12 and 30 to 1, here it is more than 50. The reason, unfortunately, is seeing dozens of games from the same genre side by side. The player takes a shotgun approach, throws everything they see onto the wishlist and buys whichever one they find best. So most of the people who land on your list are not even interested enough to follow you, they clicked in passing.

Set your conversion expectations accordingly. Until now you could look at the follower to wishlist ratio and predict how much would convert, and for me 15-30% of wishlists converted in the first week. What I have seen across 20+ games is this, the fewer followers, the lower the day 1 conversion. It turned out well for niche games, but conversion got a bit harder in the more popular genres. Valve also brought in wishlist categories and filters at the end of July, to offset this I think. Even so, you need to wait at least until next summer, until the calendar’s benchmarks settle and its effect on wishlist to lifetime conversion is visible.

And you do not need 100k to get in, the threshold is still 7k wishlists and up, same as before. It is not a rule Valve announced, of course, it is an estimate drawn from developer data. Games with 200-300 wishlists show up too, but those are pure deep cuts from the niche genre you play the most.

The lesson here is not to memorise tactics. The logic of the job never changed, gather the crowd, grow the signal, let the algorithm carry you. The only thing that changed is where that crowd gathers. The guy saying “organic reach is dead” is unfortunately saying exactly that, the route he memorised closed and he does not know the mechanism well enough to look for a new one.

So what do you do? Know which signal each shelf looks at. Popular Upcoming looked at total wishlists, the calendar looks at who the player is, and the two are not the same job. Because the calendar does not look at ownership either, your tags and your similarity metrics decide who you get shown next to, and that is why median playtime in your demo matters even more now.

A game sitting on Coming Soon never enters the calendar, so the argument is not 1 month or 2 months, it is whether you have a date at all. That is exactly the losing group Zukowski points at, indies who set a date 2-3 weeks before release launch without ever getting written into the calendar.

One of the biggest upsides of Personal Calendar is this, on the road from Early Access to 1.0 you can get visibility again. If you have enough wishlists and your metrics are broadly good, the calendar gives you another round. There is one thing I have noticed though, they put games going from EA to 1.0 below the new releases.

Also, do not depend on me. Most of the data here is already in Zukowski and GameDiscoverCo, I am writing it in Turkish with my own reading and experience added. If Valve changes something tomorrow, the great majority of these numbers become rubbish. What actually matters is strengthening your own ability to interpret so that you can see the next one coming on your own. If you do not follow the source yourself, you will be the last to hear about the next change too.

Let me say one more thing. Unfortunately I am probably the first person in Turkey to talk about Steam marketing this openly. Saying a thing like that is risky of course, it is hard to prove and honestly anyone who claims to be first always looks cheap. Even back in 2014-15 when I was working with VR I never said I was first. I am saying it anyway, because my concern is not about being first. I am tired of inexperienced people with no game industry background relaying these subjects like news and selling basic 2010s product marketing with a “look at me, I know things” pitch. What I want is for the people inside the industry and the people about to enter it to talk about this, for everyone to ask questions openly and share what they know and what they have been through, so the know-how really grows.

Up to now we have only had types explaining how good a marketer they are. But marketing decisions are tied straight to design. Which tag you put on, what you show in the capsule, which mechanic you open with in the first five seconds of the trailer, where you cut the demo, all of it is a design decision that affects marketing. Someone who has not made a game end to end cannot make any of those calls.

On top of that, people even started running paid courses on borrowed knowledge. Because of that lack of knowledge the talk here was always about tactics, nobody got into the mechanism.