Your wishlist count means less every year

At the start of August I wrote that under normal conditions you expect a follower to wishlist ratio somewhere between 1 to 12 and 1 to 30. I got that band from what I had seen myself across 20+ games. I also looked at where the band has moved over the years in GameDiscoverCo’s scan, and the floor is going up.

A wishlist is not success in itself. People talk about “I have 50k wishlists” as though the sentence means something on its own. What that number means changes every year. What counts is sales.

In the scan, wishlists per follower were 9.6 in 2021, 12 in 2023 and 16.1 today. You collect a list of the same size, but the share of real buyers inside it is dropping.

At the top it is even clearer. 1m wishlists used to be a rare thing, now a game can turn up and take it in three or four days. Dear Passengers was announced on July 14, collected 500k in the first hours, passed 1m in two days and reached 2m in two weeks, becoming the sixth most wishlisted game on Steam. The game is not even out, and the gameplay is not clear either, there is one animation trailer and that is it. Plenty of games have collected a million plus wishlists and gone down in flames.

As I have written before, players now use a shotgun approach and throw everything they see onto the wishlist. The more games Steam puts side by side each year, the more this behaviour grows. Most of the players who land on the list are not interested enough to even follow you, they click on the way past. The new wishlist categorisation features in particular have shifted player behaviour this way.

The 100 games with the lowest ratio, the ones with relatively many followers, convert 37% of their launch wishlists into sales in the first month. The 100 games with the highest ratio manage only 22%. So the low ratio group converts 68% better. If you cannot turn your wishlists into sales, those wishlists were never real.

Two names are given as well. Subnautica 2 has 5m wishlists and 352k followers, a ratio of 14.2, below the median. Outbound took 64k followers against 1.22m wishlists, a ratio of 19, and its peak stayed at 6k CCU.

But do not take this for a law either. RV There Yet? has a ratio of 42 and sold 3.7m in its first month. So the ratio tells you the ballpark conversion, it does not tell you the final result, and these are all examples from the top anyway.

All 600 odd games in the scan went into launch with more than 50k wishlists. That is probably not your band. So do not take 16.1 as a target, yours will probably be higher, and compare your own ratio against your own history.

To take an example from myself, I have two games called Wartide and Coin Harvest, both desktop companions. For a while both were sitting at around 1k wishlists, but Wartide had 110 followers while Coin Harvest had 22. So one is 9 and the other is 45, the same wishlist count with an audience five times different. Wartide’s discussions were far more active too, which is generally a signal that players care about you and a pointer to conversion.

My launch numbers go like this. I launched Metal Thunder with 3.3k wishlists and 198 followers, so my launch ratio was 16.7. DriveWave had 59 followers against 1.2k wishlists, a ratio of 20.3.

Do not look at anything after launch. Metal Thunder shows 48k wishlists and 5k followers today, but inside that 5k there are people who already bought the game, they go into the hub and follow it. So the follower count after launch tells you nothing about conversion.

Last week I worked out that selling 5k copies in the first week means going into launch with roughly 23k wishlists. The input to that calculation is shifting too. 23k wishlists three years ago and 23k wishlists today are not worth the same.

Stop looking at total wishlist count and raw CCU on their own as well, neither of them correlates with launch success. Carless puts it like this, the spread in wishlist conversion is not 10-20%, it is 10-20 times.

Working out your own ratio takes ten seconds. The wishlist balance sits in Steamworks, the follower count sits on your page, divide one by the other. And the real information is not in a one off number, it is in checking once a month until launch and seeing which way the ratio is going. If the ratio is climbing you are collecting cheap wishlists, meaning a crowd passing through a festival or a shelf landed on your list without being curious about you at all.

Know as well that you can only work this ratio out for your own game. The follower count is visible from outside, anyone looking at SteamDB can read it. The wishlist count sits with you alone. So nobody can verify a wishlist number that someone posts. The tools that estimate wishlists work off this same ratio, which means every wishlist estimate you see from outside is calculated backwards from the follower count.

Every year you do more work to collect the same list and you get less money for it.