Video Game Insights: Steam Wishlists in 2025
Another confirmation that the number of wishlists can tell a lot about the business perspective of the game.
Overall industry status by wishlists
Only 6% of projects in the last 12 months reached over 100,000 wishlists. That’s 301 projects, with 22 of them surpassing 1 million wishlists.
66% of games have fewer than 10,000 wishlists.
RPGs, strategy, and action games have a higher median number of wishlists. The lowest are MMOs and casual games. At the same time, if you look at the top 10% of MMOs by wishlists in the last 12 months, their number (183,000) is the highest among all genres. This shows that audience interest is concentrated among several large projects.
Correlation of wishlists with sales
There is a direct correlation between the number of wishlists and sales in the first month.
A small number of wishlists is not a death sentence, but the chances of such projects selling significant numbers are lower.
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100,000 wishlists is a threshold that significantly increases a project’s chances for a strong start.
Video Game Insights notes that only 141 games out of 1,500 (9%) sold more copies than they had wishlists at launch.
❗️A correlation of 70% indicates that first-month sales depend on the number of wishlists. RSQ (coefficient of determination) points out that wishlist numbers can explain 49% of sales variance. The remaining 51% is attributable to other factors.
At the same time, this prediction method works well for projects with more than 100,000 wishlists. For smaller projects, the dependence is far from obvious.
How games collect wishlists
Most top projects on Steam open their pages six months to a year before release.
Successful projects generally collect more than 70% of their wishlists in the four months leading up to launch. However, there are also successful cases with games that had a shorter marketing campaign (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Final Fantasy XVI).
Specifically, the number of wishlists for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 increased with each new trailer. Three months before release, the game had already gathered 72% of all wishlists it would have by launch.
