Plan to launch with at least 7,000 wishlists, and treat 5,000 as the floor for a commercially serious release. Chris Zukowski’s launch benchmarks, updated June 2026, put the tiers at 5,000 (Bronze), 8,000 (Silver), 50,000 (Gold), and 90,000 (Diamond), and the median indie game converts about 12% of its wishlists into sales on day one.
That’s the short answer. The rest of this post is the part most articles skip: where those tier numbers come from, which visibility thresholds actually trigger at each count, and the honest first-week revenue math, including error bars wide enough to drive a truck through. I pulled the numbers from Zukowski’s published benchmarks and GameDiscoverCo’s 2024-2025 conversion study in the first week of July 2026, so everything here reflects the post-June-2026 store refresh.
The 2026 launch wishlist benchmark tiers
Zukowski maintains a public benchmarks page built from studies of thousands of Steam games. The launch-wishlist row was updated in June 2026:
| Tier | Wishlists at launch | What it roughly means |
|---|---|---|
| Bronze | 5,000 | Minimum viable commercial launch |
| Silver | 8,000 | Solid indie launch; visibility features start working for you |
| Gold | 50,000 | Strong launch; front-page-adjacent placement plausible |
| Diamond | 90,000 | Breakout territory; Steam’s biggest featuring tiers in reach |
One provenance note before you build a plan on this table. These are not Valve numbers. Valve has never published a wishlist target, and the Steamworks wishlist documentation commits only to sending every wishlister an email or push notification when you release. The tiers are Zukowski’s percentile analysis of real game outcomes, and they have shifted upward over the years as Steam gets more crowded. For years the standard advice was “get 7,000 wishlists before you launch.” In the 2026 tiers, 7,000 sits between Bronze and Silver. Ratchet accordingly.
Also worth saying plainly: most games launch below Bronze. These tiers describe games competing for a commercial result, not the median of all 19,000+ releases in a year. If you’re at 1,500 wishlists, you’re not doomed, but the math later in this post will tell you what launch week realistically looks like.
Why 7,000 keeps coming up: the Popular Upcoming threshold
The most repeated number in wishlist discourse is 7,000, and it comes from one specific mechanic. Steam’s Popular Upcoming list is the only major placement where your raw wishlist count directly buys visibility before you’ve sold a single copy. Community tracking has long put the practical entry bar around 7,000 wishlists, with 10,000-20,000 buying a longer stay. Our full breakdown of how the Popular Upcoming list works, including the June 2026 store refresh that retuned it, is worth reading before you set a date.
The refresh matters here. The front-page tab now covers the most anticipated games of roughly a month instead of a week, which raised the effective bar for indies. In Zukowski’s updated analysis (originally 2022, revised June 2026), the interesting placement is now the personal calendar Steam added to the home page, and his estimated tiers for it are steep:
| Tier | Estimated wishlists for calendar placement |
|---|---|
| Bronze | 5,000-32,000 |
| Silver | 8,000-60,000 |
| Gold | 50,000-120,000 |
| Diamond | 90,000-360,000 |
Those ranges are wide because the calendar is personalized and the competition changes week to week. But notice that each range starts at the corresponding launch benchmark: Bronze at 5,000, Diamond at 90,000. The tier table and the visibility table are the same table wearing different clothes.
Qualification is relative, not absolute. The same 7,000 wishlists that make the list in a dead week in January will miss it in a stacked October. Check who else is releasing near your date before you trust any threshold.
Steam wishlist conversion rate: what a wishlist is worth
A wishlist is a maybe, not a preorder. The canonical stat we use across this site: the median indie game converts about 12% of its wishlists on day one. Our wishlist conversion rate deep dive covers the full decay curve; the launch-week summary is that week 1 typically lands at 15-20% cumulative for the median game.
Bigger games convert better. Zukowski’s conversion research broke median first-week conversion out by launch wishlist count:
| Wishlists at launch | Median first-week conversion |
|---|---|
| Under 5,000 | 15% |
| 5,000-39,999 | 20% |
| 40,000-99,999 | 23% |
| 100,000+ | 25% |
That study dates to June 2020, so treat the exact percentages as directional. The more recent check is GameDiscoverCo’s state of Steam wishlist conversions, which covered roughly a year of releases starting September 2024 and found a median of 0.15x (15%) first-week conversion for games launching with more than 25,000 wishlists, dropping to 0.10x for games priced above $10. Two datasets, five years apart, same ballpark: your first week sells roughly 10-25% of your launch wishlist count, with 15-20% as the sensible central estimate.
Why do the newer medians run a touch lower? GameDiscoverCo’s data includes organic purchases mixed with wishlist conversions and is dragged around by adult games and deep-discount launches, and prices have risen (higher price, lower conversion). The honest read is that conversion hasn’t collapsed; wishlists have just gotten harder to earn.
First-week units by wishlist count: a model, not a promise
Put the buckets and the conversion medians together and you get an expectations table. I want to be explicit about what this is: a model that multiplies your wishlist count by the median conversion for your bucket. Half of games do worse than every bar on this chart, by definition.
A subtlety the chart hides: not all of those units are literal wishlist conversions. Launch sales come from wishlist emails, from the visibility your launch spike buys (New & Trending, discovery queue), and from external traffic arriving that week. The conversion ratio bundles all of it, which is exactly why bigger wishlist counts show higher ratios. More wishlists means a bigger day-1 spike, which means more algorithmic visibility, which means more sales that get counted against your wishlist number. The flywheel is the product you’re buying with those wishlists.
Turning units into dollars
Run one worked example so the abstraction becomes a budget line. Say you launch at $14.99 with a standard 10% launch discount. Effective price: $13.49. After Steam’s 30% cut, you net about $9.44 per unit before VAT, refunds, and regional pricing haircuts.
| Wishlists at launch | Modeled week-1 units | Modeled week-1 net revenue |
|---|---|---|
| 2,000 | ~300 | ~$2,800 |
| 5,000 | ~1,000 | ~$9,400 |
| 10,000 | ~2,000 | ~$18,900 |
| 25,000 | ~5,000 | ~$47,200 |
| 50,000 | ~11,500 | ~$108,600 |
Launch week is typically the single biggest revenue event your game will ever have; discounts during seasonal sales convert most of the wishlists that survive it. If the week-1 number at your current wishlist count doesn’t cover your remaining runway, you have three levers: more wishlists, a different price, or adjusted expectations. Our Wishlist Calculator runs this exact model with your own count, price, and genre so you don’t have to interpolate from my table.
The error bars are enormous, and you should plan like it
Here is the sentence from GameDiscoverCo’s study that should be stapled to every wishlist benchmark post: conversion outcomes “vary by 10-20x, not 10-20%.” A game with 50,000 wishlists has landed anywhere from a few thousand week-1 sales to well over 100,000. The median is a planning number, not a prediction. What moves you inside that range:
- Wishlist recency, maybe. The community argument runs both ways. Zukowski’s cohort analysis of wishlist age found old wishlists convert about as well as new ones for the games he could measure. What recency clearly does buy you is velocity, which Steam’s algorithm reads as momentum around launch. Fresh wishlists from a Next Fest demo last month do more for your launch-week visibility than the same count earned two years ago.
- Price. Above $10, the median first-week conversion in GameDiscoverCo’s data drops from 0.15x to 0.10x. Higher prices still usually win on revenue; just don’t apply a $5-game conversion rate to a $25 game.
- Genre. Roguelikes and horror convert day-1 buyers well; story games and multiplayer titles see more wait-and-see behavior. Same wishlist count, different week 1.
- Review velocity. A page showing Very Positive by day three converts fence-sitting wishlisters measurably better than one stuck below ten reviews.
- Launch timing. Releasing into a major sale or against a genre juggernaut suppresses conversion. Our best launch dates analysis covers the calendar math.
So when you model your launch, run three scenarios: median conversion, half of median, and double. If the half-median case is survivable, your plan is real. If only the double case works, you don’t have a plan yet.
What it actually takes to reach 100,000 wishlists
The “how do I get 100k wishlists” question deserves a straight answer: almost nobody does, and the ones who do rarely get there through grinding tactics. 100,000 wishlists is Diamond-plus territory, the zone where Steam’s front-page featuring becomes plausible and top-10 personal calendar placement starts. Games at that level typically have some combination of a breakout demo, a publisher or platform beat (a trailer slot at a major event, a famous streamer moment), years of audience building, or a hook so legible that a single trailer does the recruiting.
The repeatable machinery underneath is the same at every scale, though, and it compounds:
- A Coming Soon page live 6-12 months out, built to convert (start with our how to get Steam wishlists playbook for the full tactic list, ranked by real yield).
- A demo, because demos are the single most reliable wishlist engine available to indies, especially during Steam Next Fest. Zukowski’s February 2026 Next Fest benchmarks call 7,000-10,000 wishlists from one fest a Gold result and 10,000+ Diamond.
- External beats spaced to keep velocity up near launch: announcements, festival appearances, creator coverage.
- Paid ads only as a topping-off tool at $1-2 per wishlist, and stop or rework anything above $3.
At those ad rates, buying your way from 5,000 to 100,000 wishlists would run roughly $95,000-190,000 in ad spend. That’s the whole argument for the organic machinery in one sentence.
Work backward from your revenue goal
The cleanest way to answer “how many wishlists do I need” for your game is to invert the model:
Wishlists needed = target week-1 net revenue / (conversion rate x net price per unit)
Example: you want $30,000 net in week 1 at $19.99 with a 10% discount. Net per unit is about $12.59. At a conservative 15% conversion, you need $30,000 / (0.15 x $12.59) = roughly 15,900 wishlists. At the 20% median for that bucket, about 11,900. Split the difference and call your target 14,000, then check it against the tier table: that’s a Silver-to-Gold launch, which is consistent with a $30K first week. When the two methods agree, trust the number.
Run your own version in the Wishlist Calculator, then sanity-check lifetime revenue in the Revenue Calculator, which layers in the long tail and sale events.
Decision rules before you lock a launch date
The number you have is the number you have. What matters is matching your launch plan to it:
- Under 2,000: Launching now means a hobby-scale result. If this game is a business, delay and build. If it’s done and you’re moving on, launch, learn, and bank the audience for game two.
- 2,000-5,000: Viable for low-cost solo devs. Skip the Popular Upcoming obsession; it probably won’t happen. Spend the energy on launch-week reviews and creator outreach instead.
- 5,000-8,000 (Bronze to Silver): You’re in the game. One well-timed Next Fest or demo push can move you a full tier. This is the range where delaying one quarter most often pays for itself.
- 8,000-50,000 (Silver to Gold): Launch mechanics dominate now: date selection, discount, review velocity, day-1 marketing beat. The wishlists are doing their job; don’t fumble the week.
- 50,000+: Your problem is execution and expectation management, not acquisition. Model conservatively anyway; the error bars don’t care how big your number is.
Whatever bracket you’re in, do the twenty-minute version of this analysis before committing: model week 1 at half, one, and two times median conversion in the Wishlist Calculator, check your date against the Popular Upcoming competition, and make sure the page those wishlist emails will land on is ready. Run it through the free Steam Page Analyzer first; a wishlist notification that lands on a weak store page is a conversion you already paid for and then refunded.