How to Get Steam Wishlists: Tactics Ranked by Real Data

Ask anyone what an indie Steam launch needs and the answer is wishlists, yet almost nobody attaches numbers to the advice on getting them. So I pulled together the data that actually exists: Valve’s documentation, Chris Zukowski’s benchmark surveys, GameDiscoverCo’s festival analyses, and a few unusually well-documented case studies. The picture is clear and a little uncomfortable. The channels that produce nearly all wishlists are the ones most devs execute late or half-heartedly, while the tactics that eat most of their time barely register in the data.

Valve’s own documentation states that “Wishlists can be an important factor in determining where your game appears on Steam,” and confirms there is no minimum wishlist count required for your page to appear in the store. The count matters for visibility, but you are never locked out for being small.

The mechanical value is concrete. When your game releases, into Early Access or 1.0, every player who has it wishlisted at that moment receives an email and/or a mobile push notification. That is the largest free marketing blast you will ever send. Discounts trigger wishlist notifications too, but only at 20% or more, and players have a 1-2 week cooldown between wishlist emails, so launch day is the one moment you reach the entire list at once.

Wishlists also feed Steam’s pre-launch visibility surfaces. The best known is Popular Upcoming, where Zukowski’s rule of thumb has been that around 7,000 wishlists makes an appearance likely at some point, though that figure predates Valve’s June 2026 store refresh, which may push the effective bar higher; the threshold mechanics live in our Popular Upcoming breakdown. And after launch, a predictable fraction of the list converts to sales, which I covered in the wishlist conversion rates post.

For scale, here are Zukowski’s wishlists-at-launch tiers:

Everything below is about climbing that table before release day, ranked by what the data says each tactic produces.

The first lever is unglamorous: publish your Coming Soon page early and make it good. Zukowski’s benchmarks for the first two weeks after a page goes live are 100 wishlists for Bronze, 500 for Silver, 1,200 for Gold, and 7,000 for Diamond, and in his data games with strong commercial potential usually gather more than 150 wishlists in those first two weeks. After the launch spike, a typical week with no marketing beat looks like this:

Two weeks of real data tells you more about your game’s commercial prospects than a year of guessing, which is the strongest argument for putting the page up early.

Here is why the page itself gates every other tactic in this post. Per Zukowski, 68-88% of wishlists gained during Next Fest come from people who never downloaded the demo. They wishlist off the capsule, the screenshots, and the short description. Every festival appearance, Reddit post, and streamer clip ends the same way: someone glances at your page for a few seconds and decides. The page is the multiplier on everything else you do. Get the fundamentals right with our Coming Soon page guide and the capsule design guide.

Zukowski has said in interviews that roughly 90% of new Steam wishlist adds come from online festivals and streamer coverage. That figure comes from an interview summary rather than a published dataset, so treat it as directional, but it matches what I see in dev postmortems: festivals are where the step changes happen.

Steam Next Fest is the big one, and it is getting crowded fast. February 2026’s edition fielded more than 3,500 demos, 19% more than October 2025 and 51% more than a year earlier. GameDiscoverCo’s follower-based estimates put the median Feb 2026 demo at about 11 new followers, roughly 200 wishlists, while the top 5% gained around 350 followers, roughly 7,000 wishlists, down from roughly 10,000 a year earlier. October 2025 looked similar: the median game added 18 followers (fewer than 500 wishlists), the top 10% about 3,000 wishlists, and the top 5% about 7,000.

Zukowski’s survey of 182 devs after the February 2026 fest adds the most useful cut of the data: gains scaled with the wishlists you brought in.

Pre-fest wishlist count is the strongest predictor of fest performance in Zukowski’s data, with a Spearman correlation of 0.825. Momentum compounds. Every wishlist you collect before the fest multiplies what the fest itself returns, which is why “just enter Next Fest” is incomplete advice in 2026.

Smaller festivals matter too. Zukowski maintains a directory of third-party and genre-specific online events like The MIX, the OTK Games Expo, and the Wholesome Games events. Median gains from these are modest, but they give you guaranteed visibility on a known date, which is exactly what you need to coordinate a trailer drop or demo update around. For fest execution details, work through our Next Fest checklist, and pull the registration deadlines from the Next Fest 2026 dates guide.

The most actionable single finding in Zukowski’s fest data: games that launched their demo well before Next Fest earned roughly 2.5x more wishlists from the fest than games that launched the demo right at the event. The instinct to “save” the demo for the fest costs you more than half the prize.

The timing advantage exists because demos became a discoverability surface in their own right. Since Valve’s demo overhaul rolled out from late 2024, demos can have their own store pages with separate reviews, players who wishlisted your main game get notified when the demo goes live, and demos appear in New & Trending and in tag and category lists the way free games do. A demo launch is now a marketing beat by itself, and an early launch gives you months to collect feedback and reviews before the fest crowd arrives.

Benchmark your demo with Zukowski’s survey numbers: the median demo conversion rate (players who played and wishlisted, divided by total demo players) was 16.33%, with the 30th percentile at 12% and the 70th at 20%. If you are converting under 12%, the demo itself needs work before more traffic will help, and our demo best practices guide covers what to fix.

The famous case is Song of Iron. One Reddit post titled “Been working in games for over 10 years thought it was time I made my own” earned 135,000 upvotes and took the game from 52 wishlists to 13,702 in roughly four days. It reached 89,082 gross wishlists by its August 2021 launch. That is festival-scale impact from a free post.

You cannot plan a 135,000-upvote post. You can buy lottery tickets cheaply and repeatedly: post in the subreddits where your genre’s players actually hang out, lead with motion (a GIF or short clip outperforms a static screenshot), and frame it as a person’s story rather than an ad, which is exactly what that title did. Most posts will do nothing. The cost of each attempt is an hour, the tail outcome is five figures of wishlists, and my take is that this asymmetry makes a monthly posting habit worth it for almost everyone.

One more finding from the same case study removes a common excuse for waiting. Zukowski’s cohort analysis of Song of Iron found no evidence that wishlists “get old”: conversion across age cohorts averaged 8.02% with only about a 2% standard deviation. Wishlists collected years early still showed up at launch, so an early viral win is never wasted.

Zukowski’s line on this is blunt: “a streamer can’t play screenshots or a trailer.” Streamer coverage sits alongside festivals in his rough 90% figure, and it has the same prerequisite, a playable build.

The ceiling is high. When Spanish streamer Knekro played the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 demo, the game generated over 14,000 net Steam wishlists that same day, its biggest pre-release single-day spike, per Stream Hatchet’s analysis using GameDiscoverCo estimates. You are probably not sitting on the next Clair Obscur, but the mechanism scales down: a mid-size creator whose audience matches your genre converts far better than a big variety streamer who plays your game as filler.

Practical version: have the demo live first, then send short, personal emails to creators who already play games like yours. Include a key, the demo link, and one GIF. Time the push to a festival or demo update so the coverage stacks with a visibility event instead of landing in a quiet week.

A well-targeted campaign runs roughly $1-2 per wishlist: Chris Zukowski’s rule of thumb is $1, Patrick Tang’s documented This Grand Life 2 campaign averaged $1.10, and write-ups from StraySpark and GameDev.net report the same spread. Poorly targeted campaigns run $3-4+ per wishlist, and at that price you stop and fix the creative or the targeting rather than spend more.

Paying makes sense in three cases, in my view: you are close to a visibility threshold near launch and a few thousand wishlists change your launch-week trajectory; you want cheap, fast A/B data on capsules and taglines before a festival; or a publisher is funding the spend. For a solo dev, ads belong at the end of the priority list, after the free channels above are actually running. The full break-even math on what an ad-bought wishlist is worth at your price point lives in the marketing budget guide.

Some honest words about where the hours go versus where the wishlists come from.

Posting screenshots on X to an audience of other developers is the classic trap. Devs follow devs, and devs wishlist politely but they are not your market. The same goes for devlogs aimed at the gamedev community rather than players of your genre. Press releases to large outlets rarely land for unknown indies; big sites cover momentum, they do not create it. Key giveaways and “retweet to win” promotions attract prize hunters whose wishlists exist to win things, and a Discord server opened before you have an audience is a room you talk to alone.

None of these are worthless. They are maintenance channels, fine at low effort once the big levers are set. The failure mode I keep seeing is devs grinding daily social posts for 30 wishlists a month while their demo sits unfinished and a festival deadline passes.

Here is how the data assembles into a sequence.

The order matters more than the effort. Page quality multiplies the fest, the fest multiplies on pre-fest momentum, and the demo has to exist months before either. Run the sequence backward from your launch window and the deadlines set themselves.

The practical first step is the cheapest one: if your page has been live for two weeks and you are under 150 wishlists, stop planning festivals and fix the page first. The data says everything else you do will be multiplied by it, or divided.