Follower counts are public. Wishlist counts are private. That one asymmetry is the reason every indie dev eventually learns to take a competitor’s follower number and multiply it by about 10 to guess how many wishlists that game is sitting on. The community rule of thumb is roughly 10 wishlists per follower for an unreleased game, with a realistic spread of about 7x to 15x depending on genre and marketing. The rest of this post is where that number comes from, how to run the estimate on a real store page, and the situations where it quietly stops working.
One honesty note before anything else: Valve has never published a follower-to-wishlist ratio. Nobody at Valve has ever said “multiply by 10.” The multiplier is community-documented, built from developer surveys run by GameDiscoverCo, and it has drifted upward over the years. Treat it as a back-of-envelope estimate, not a Valve API. Every number below names the survey and the year it came from.
What a Steam follower is, and what a wishlist is
The best way to hold these apart: a follow means “keep me posted,” a wishlist means “remind me to buy.”
Following a game subscribes you to its announcements in your Steam activity feed ( patch notes, dev updates, new trailers ). That is the whole feature. Following a game does not email you when it launches or goes on sale. Following a studio or publisher does send one launch email, which is a different action people constantly mix up. Chris Zukowski puts it plainly: “a wishlist means they want to buy it and a follow means they want to hear more information.”
A wishlist is the buy-intent signal, and it comes with real machinery. Per the Steamworks wishlist docs, the moment your game releases, every wishlister with a verified email and notifications on gets an email and a mobile push. Run a discount of 20% or more on the lowest-priced package, lasting over 8 hours, and wishlisters get another email ( with a 1-2 week cooldown so nobody gets spammed ). Wishlists also feed the Popular Upcoming list and your launch-day visibility, which is the machinery that decides whether Steam shows your game to strangers in the first week. Our Popular Upcoming explainer walks through that surface.
Here is the asymmetry that makes this whole post necessary. Your follower count is printed on the game’s Steam page and tracked publicly by tools like SteamDB, readable by anyone. Your wishlist count is private, visible only to you inside the Steamworks dashboard. So when you want to size up a competitor, you can read their followers and you have to infer their wishlists. The multiplier is the bridge across that gap.
Both counts are soft demand, not sales. A follower costs the player nothing and a wishlist costs nothing. Neither is money in the bank until launch day converts it.
The follower-to-wishlist ratio: what the number actually is
Answer first: about 10 wishlists per follower for an unreleased game, with an honest working range of roughly 7x to 15x.
That number has a paper trail, and it has moved. GameDiscoverCo ( Simon Carless ) has run developer surveys on this twice, and the two data points tell a story:
- February 2021 ( 113 games ): median 9.6x, average 9.64x, with the vast majority landing between 5x and 14x. This survey is where the famous “10x” rule of thumb was born.
- June 2023 ( 125+ games ): median 12x, average 12.37x, with most games between 7x and 20x. The median climbed about 25% in two years.
So if you want to be precise about provenance: the single best-supported median is 9.6x from the 2021 survey, and the more recent read is 12x from 2023. The round “10x” everyone quotes sits right between them, which is exactly why it survives as the default. If a number floats past you claiming “9.6x, 2024,” it is almost certainly the 2021 figure with the wrong year attached. I could not find a 2024 GameDiscoverCo follower-to-wishlist survey when I checked in July 2026.
Read that chart as a spread, not three separate facts. When you multiply a follower count by 10, you are picking the middle of a wide band. The conservative and optimistic ends are 30% below and 50% above, and where a specific game lands inside that band depends mostly on one thing: genre.
Genre moves the multiplier more than anything else
Genre pulls the ratio around harder than marketing spend does. The June 2023 GameDiscoverCo survey broke the multiplier out by tag, and the spread is wide:
The pattern is consistent. Deep, complex PC games ( 4X, strategy, survival ) run lower multipliers, closer to 7x to 9.5x, because their audience is engaged enough to both follow and wishlist at similar rates. Cozy, narrative, and puzzle games run higher, 13x to 16x, because casual players will wishlist a pretty capsule on impulse but rarely bother to follow.
The practical takeaway: if you know the genre of the game you are estimating, nudge off the 10x baseline. A relaxing farming sim with 2,000 followers is probably closer to 30,000 wishlists than 20,000. A hardcore 4X with the same 2,000 followers is probably closer to 15,000.
These are medians of noisy survey data with real outliers on both sides. GameDiscoverCo says it directly: the multiplier “can’t provide 100% correct results for every unreleased game.” Use it to get within a factor of about 1.5, never to the nearest thousand.
The estimation recipe: from a public follower count to a wishlist guess
The whole method is four steps and takes about a minute per game.
- Find the follower count. Open the target’s Steam page, or pull the number from a tracker like SteamDB. Followers are public; this is the input you always have.
- Multiply by 10 for the baseline. Then multiply by 7 and by 15 to bracket your low and high. Now you have a range, not a false-precision single number.
- Adjust for genre. Cozy, narrative, puzzle: shade toward the high end. Strategy, survival, hardcore: shade toward the low end.
- Sanity-check exposure. A game that has been through a Next Fest or landed a front-page feature tends to sit near 10x or a touch above; one that has done zero events runs lower ( the 2021 survey put “no festival, no feature” games at about 7.8x ).
Worked micro-scenario. Say a competitor in your genre is unreleased and its Steam page shows 2,500 followers. Baseline: 2,500 x 10 = 25,000 wishlists. Bracket it: 2,500 x 7 and 2,500 x 15 gives a range of 17,500 to 37,500. That is your read on their pre-launch demand, and it is honest about its own fuzziness.
Now chain it forward. That wishlist estimate is a demand signal, not a revenue number, so you need one more hop. Once a game actually launches, the follower math stops working ( buyers clear their wishlists, and the ratio falls apart ), so you switch to a different public signal: review count. Run their reviews through the Boxleiter method, around a 30x reviews-to-sales multiplier for recent releases, then multiply units by price and by your after-refund, after-Steam-cut fraction to land on a revenue ballpark. Our full sales estimation walkthrough chains all of it end to end. Two public numbers, two rough estimates, one competitor sized up.
If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, the wishlist calculator runs the follower-to-wishlist step and lets you set the multiplier for your genre. Feed it a follower count, get the bracketed range back.
When the 10x ratio breaks
Perhaps more useful than knowing when the multiplier works is knowing when it lies to you. Four situations break it, and I will label how confident I am about each.
Released games. ( High confidence. ) The 10x rule is built entirely on unreleased games. After launch, players buy the game and it drops off their wishlist, so the follower-to-wishlist ratio collapses. GameDiscoverCo is explicit that the multiplier “breaks down a bit after Steam release.” For a released game, do not estimate wishlists from followers at all; use reviews and the Boxleiter method for sales instead.
Viral spikes vs slow-built community. ( Medium confidence. ) A game that got one big TikTok or a streamer moment can pile up followers and wishlists fast, but the mix skews toward low-intent impulse wishlists. A game that built its audience slowly through a demo and a Discord tends to have a healthier, more convertible list at the same headline number. The multiplier does not see quality, only counts. Two games at 20,000 wishlists can convert very differently at launch.
Genre extremes. ( High confidence, per the survey. ) Covered above, but worth repeating as a break case: applying a flat 10x to a puzzle game underestimates it by half, and applying it to a 4X overestimates. Genre is the single biggest source of error.
Free-to-play. ( Lower confidence, thin data. ) F2P changes the meaning of a wishlist, since there is no purchase to intend, and the follower-to-wishlist relationship the surveys measured was drawn from paid games. I would not trust the 10x number on an F2P title. Treat it as unknown rather than plugging in a figure you cannot support.
There is nothing magic about 10x. It is a median of a noisy distribution, and it drifted from 9.6x to 12x in two years. If your own estimate and someone else’s disagree by 20%, you are both inside the noise. Do not build a launch plan on the third significant figure of a number that is really a range.
Which should you optimize for, followers or wishlists?
Neither, directly. That is the honest answer, and it surprises people.
You cannot really “optimize for followers” or “optimize for wishlists” as separate campaigns, because both are downstream of the same upstream thing: qualified traffic hitting a store page that is good enough to convert it. A player lands on your page. If the page does its job, some of them wishlist and a few follow. If the page is weak, both numbers stay flat no matter how much traffic you buy. The follow button and the wishlist button sit inches apart on the same page, fed by the same visitors.
So the real lever is store-page conversion rate, not either count in isolation. Get more of the right people to the page ( a topic for our Steam marketing guide ) and make the page convert them ( capsule, trailer, first three screenshots, short description ). The wishlists and followers follow from that. If you are specifically short on wishlists, the tactics live in how to get Steam wishlists; if you are trying to work out whether you have enough of them to launch, how many wishlists before launch has the benchmarks.
This is also the point of running the estimate on your own page, not just competitors’. Multiply your followers by 10, compare to your actual private wishlist count, and the gap tells you something. If your real wishlists are well below 10x your followers, you have a following audience that is not converting to buy-intent, usually a page or pricing signal problem. If they are well above 15x, you are pulling impulse wishlists faster than you are building a committed community, which can mean a softer launch than the raw number suggests.
If you want that comparison done for you against the rest of your store page, run your page through the free Steam Page Analyzer. It reads your public signals, flags where your conversion is leaking, and tells you which fix moves the needle first.
How to use this without fooling yourself
A short decision rule, so you leave with something you can act on tomorrow:
- Estimating a competitor’s demand? Only if they are unreleased. Take their public followers, multiply by 10, bracket with 7x and 15x, then shade for genre. Report the range, never the single number.
- The game already launched? Drop the follower math entirely. Read their review count and run Boxleiter for units, then estimate sales for revenue.
- Checking your own health? Compare your real ( private ) wishlist count to 10x your followers. Below the range means a conversion problem on the page; above it means impulse interest that may not hold at launch.
- Tempted to game one number? Don’t. Followers and wishlists are both outputs of store-page traffic and quality. Fix the page, and both climb together.
The multiplier is a useful lie: precise enough to plan around, wrong enough that you should always carry the range with it. Followers are the number you can see, wishlists are the number that matters, and about 10x is the bridge between them until the day the game ships and the bridge falls down.