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 wishlist 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. Its visibility documentation is narrower: “With a few exceptions like the Popular Upcoming tab, wishlists are not a factor in your game’s algorithmic visibility on Steam.” So the count buys you specific placements rather than a general ranking boost (what Valve states and what developers infer), and 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, part of the list converts to sales, about 10.5% in week one at the median, which I covered in the wishlist conversion rates post.

For scale, here are the low ends of Zukowski’s wishlists-at-launch tiers, as updated in June 2026. Each is the floor of a wider, overlapping range for placement on Steam’s Personal Calendar: Silver runs 8,000 to 60,000 and Gold 50,000 to 120,000.

Everything below is about climbing that table before release day, ranked by what the data says each tactic produces; for turning the tiers into a concrete target for your own game, see how many wishlists you need before launch.

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, with deadlines and fees, including The MIX and Wholesome Snack. I could not find a published median for what these events earn, but they give you a slot on a known date, which is exactly what you need to coordinate a trailer drop or demo update around. Valve’s own themed Fests are the other route, and the FAQ below covers both. For fest execution details, work through our Next Fest checklist, and pull the registration deadlines from the Next Fest 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. He cautions that this correlation is weaker (r = -0.205), with “a lot of overlap” between the groups, and that some late demos did quite well. So saving the demo for the fest may cost you wishlists, but the data does not prove it.

One likely reason for the timing gap is that demos became a discoverability surface in their own right. Since Valve’s July 2024 demo overhaul, 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, and check the date on them. In his February 2026 Next Fest survey of 182 developers, 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%. His June 2026 Next Fest survey came in higher: 19.3% at the median, 15.9% and 23.2% at the same percentiles. 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. If you are weighing a browser build against a demo, see whether playable experiences beat Steam demos.

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 weakens 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. GameDiscoverCo’s October 2025 study points the other way: its top-converting launches had been on Steam an average of 214 days before release, against 411 for the under-converters. One case study against one correlation settles nothing, but it does mean an early viral win is worth having and is not a reason to stop marketing near launch - and if part of a spike deletes itself over the following weeks, that is normal churn, as our wishlist drops explainer lays out.

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. For the full process, see how to get streamers to play your game, and keep an indie game press kit linked from your email.

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 should 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.

Once you have a few weeks of real numbers, plug your current rate into the Wishlist Velocity projector to see where that pace actually lands you at launch and the gap to each named threshold, then use the Wishlist Calculator to see how many wishlists your revenue goal takes.

How can I get more Steam wishlists before launch?

Put the store page up early, ship a demo months before a festival, enter festivals with wishlists already on the board, then send the demo to creators who play games like yours. The festival part of that order comes from Zukowski’s survey of 182 games at the February 2026 Next Fest: wishlists held before the fest were the strongest predictor of wishlists earned (Spearman 0.825), and demos launched well ahead of it earned about 2.5x more, on a weaker correlation. Between those beats, post to Reddit monthly, and leave paid ads at $1 to $2 a wishlist until last. To see where your current pace lands at launch, use the Wishlist Velocity projector.

What are the alternatives to Steam Next Fest for growing wishlists?

Valve’s own themed Fests and third-party online festivals are the closest alternatives, and you will need them, because Valve says “A game may only appear once in Steam Next Fest.” Themed Fests are typically promoted on the front page of Steam, and Valve says “while discount games are prioritized, free games, games in Coming Soon, and games with demos are also welcome to participate.” Each event page “will most prominently feature discounted games”, so an unreleased game gets a place in the upcoming or demo sections, not equal billing. Valve picks games by their tags and store page, and “a game must be primarily about the theme”, so check your tags first. Valve’s events page lists the dates. Upcoming ones include the Auto-Battler RPG Fest (November 16 to 23, 2026), Shop Keeper Fest (January 25 to February 1, 2027) and Couch Co-Op Fest (February 8 to 15, 2027).

For third-party events, Zukowski’s directory showed ten open calls on November 2, 2026, seven of them free. Organizers pick their own lineups. Two past examples, both closed and not among those ten, are Wholesome Snack 2026 (free, closed September 15), a curated lineup of games “that inspire hope, joy, and introspection”, and The MIX's fall event (listed at $600, closed August 10). Weigh any fee against what it may return: one two-person team said a $600 slot on a MIX stream brought about 65 new wishlists in 24 hours, about 30 of them from a GameTrailers upload of its trailer, and that it was still happy it took part, as TheGamer reported on March 11, 2026. Outside festivals, the channels with documented spikes are creators and Reddit, both covered above.

What marketing tactics generate high-quality Steam wishlists?

Little is published on this and most of it is old, but festival and ad wishlists look weaker than others. Valve’s figures for the first Next Fest in 2020 imply its wishlists converted at about 0.75x the normal rate, on GameDiscoverCo’s reading after checking with Valve’s staff. The Riftbreaker’s wishlists from the February and June 2021 fests converted 20-30% lower, and GameDiscoverCo took the two together as “around 25% less” for fest wishlists, adding that it is not sure how this has changed since. Festivals still came out ahead: Valve’s 2020 numbers meant about 5x the wishlists and nearly 4x the eventual buyers. For ads, the developer of Furnish Master said “the wishlists from ads were of worse quality [and] converted into sales less effectively.”

Newer evidence does not split by source. In Zukowski’s 2026 opt-in survey, the median game launched in 2023-25 (126 of his 160 games) sold 0.22 units per launch wishlist in its first month, against 0.45 for 2020-22, and he says “we have suspected for a while that festival wishlists don’t convert as well.” WN Hub’s summary of a LinkedIn post by Kirill Oreshkin of Polden Publishing says streamers and YouTubers “often bring the most engaged audience”, one “likely to purchase it in the future”, which is one publisher’s view.

Valve’s UTM analytics won’t settle this for your game: it counts wishlists and purchases only within 72 hours of the click, and only for logged-in visitors, so it shows volume per link, not whether those wishlists buy later. GameDiscoverCo points to Steam’s “wishlist conversion by cohort” report instead, which lets you compare the months you ran a fest or an ad push. Our guide to how many wishlists you need before launch shows what they are worth.

How many wishlists do I need before launch?

Valve’s own documentation confirms there is no minimum wishlist count required for your page to appear in the store, so you are never locked out for being small. Zukowski’s tiers give a target instead: the low ends are 5,000 wishlists at launch for Bronze, 8,000 for Silver, 50,000 for Gold, and 90,000 for Diamond, and the ranges above them overlap.

What gets the most wishlists per hour of effort?

Festivals and streamer coverage together produce roughly 90% of new Steam wishlist adds, according to Zukowski. That beats the maintenance channels devs spend the most time on - posting screenshots to other developers on X, devlogs, press releases, and giveaways - and this post’s own observation is that devs who grind out daily social posts on X specifically tend to net only around 30 wishlists a month for the effort. A monthly Reddit post is a better use of that hour, since the tail outcome can reach five figures of wishlists.

Do wishlists convert to sales?

Yes: about 10.5% of your launch wishlists convert to sales in the first week at the median, per GameDiscoverCo’s study of about 420 games, with a very wide spread. Over the whole first month, the median game launched in 2023-25 (126 of the 160 in Zukowski’s 2026 opt-in survey) sold 0.22 units per launch wishlist. The mechanism is concrete - every player who has the game wishlisted at the moment it releases, or leaves Early Access, gets an email and/or mobile push notification, the largest free marketing blast a launch gets. Discounts of 20% or more trigger the same notification, but players only get one every 1-2 weeks, so launch day is the one moment the whole list is reached at once.

When should the store page go live?

As early as possible: this post’s first lever is publishing the Coming Soon page early and making 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. If the page has been live for two weeks and wishlists are under 150, the fix is the page itself, not more festivals or outreach.