A game entering launch with 100,000 Steam wishlists sold roughly 15,000 copies in its first week. That is the median for every title carrying 25,000 or more wishlists released between September 2024 and August 2025, per GameDiscoverCo. A wishlist marks interest, not a purchase. This post covers Steam wishlist conversion rates, the games that beat their forecasts, 2025’s most-wishlisted titles, and Steam Next Fest benchmarks, with each figure traced to its source and period.
Steam Wishlist Statistics: Key Facts
- The median Steam wishlist-to-first-week-sales ratio was 0.15x for games with 25,000+ launch wishlists (GameDiscoverCo, Sept 2024–Aug 2025).
- Games priced above $10 converted at 0.10x, mapping 100,000 wishlists to about 10,000 first-week copies (GameDiscoverCo, Sept 2024–Aug 2025).
- Titles entering launch with 500,000+ wishlists turned 32% of wishlisters into buyers within a month (Alinea Analytics, H1 2025).
- Hollow Knight: Silksong topped all 2025 games at an estimated 4.8 million wishlists (Alinea Analytics, Aug 2025).
- Peak sold 266 times its expected first-week conversion, the year’s biggest over-performer (GameDiscoverCo, Sept 2024–Sept 2025).
The through-line across these numbers: price, review score, genre, and timing move sales far more than the raw wishlist count. Steam keeps absolute wishlist totals private, so every figure below is an estimate or a survey result from firms that track the platform.
Steam Wishlist Conversion Rate at Launch
GameDiscoverCo measured the ratio of first-week sales to launch wishlists, counting both wishlist buyers and organic buyers. The median landed at 0.15x for games with more than 25,000 wishlists. Price splits the field hardest: titles above $10 drop to 0.10x.
| Segment | Wishlist-to-first-week-sales ratio (median) |
|---|---|
| 25,000+ wishlists at launch | 0.15x |
| Adult titles removed | 0.14x |
| Priced above $10 at launch | 0.10x |
| 10,000+ wishlists (2024 dev poll) | 0.17x |
Source: GameDiscoverCo, September 2024–August 2025 (2024 poll figure from a separate developer survey).
Adult games nudge the median up. Stripping them out moves it only from 0.15x to 0.14x, so their pull is real but small. The bigger caveat is spread. GameDiscoverCo found individual results ranging from ten times below the median to twenty times above it, which is why a single wishlist number forecasts almost nothing on its own. For related platform figures, see our gaming statistics library.
Conversion by segment
How Steam Wishlist Conversion Climbs After Launch
Conversion keeps rising after release because Steam emails every wishlister at launch and again on each discount. Alinea Analytics measured this for high-wishlist games specifically. Titles entering launch with more than 500,000 wishlists converted 19% of wishlisters to buyers one day out, 26% after a week, and 32% after a month.
| Window after launch | Wishlisters who bought |
|---|---|
| 1 day | 19% |
| 1 week | 26% |
| 1 month | 32% |
Source: Alinea Analytics, H1 2025 (games with 500,000+ wishlists at launch).
Alinea’s read is that higher wishlist counts bring both more buyers and a higher conversion percentage. This measures the share of wishlisters who purchased, a different metric from GameDiscoverCo’s sales-to-wishlist ratio, and it applies only to the largest games.
Highest-Converting Steam Wishlist Games
Some 2025 releases sold far past what their wishlist counts predicted. GameDiscoverCo ranked over-performers against each game’s expected first-week conversion. Peak, the co-op climbing game, led at 266 times its forecast.
| Game | Sales vs. expected first-week conversion |
|---|---|
| Peak | 266x |
| Mage Arena | 78x |
| R.E.P.O. | 68x |
| Webfishing | 67x |
| FlyKnight | 18x |
Source: GameDiscoverCo, September 2024–September 2025.
Online co-op fills the list. Streamer coverage and word of mouth pull in buyers who never wishlisted, a pattern also visible around titles like ARC Raiders and its live player counts. Reviews separated winners from the rest. The top 20 converters averaged a 91% first-week Steam review score, against 67% for the weakest titles.
Time on the store page tracked the same split. Under-performers sat live for 411 days on average before launch, versus 214 days for strong converters, per GameDiscoverCo. Slow wishlist accumulation over a long runway reads as fading interest rather than building demand.
Steam’s Most-Wishlisted 2025 Games
Alinea Analytics estimated pre-launch wishlists for the year’s biggest upcoming titles in August 2025. Hollow Knight: Silksong led at 4.8 million, built over years of sparse updates from Team Cherry. Its top markets were the United States at 20% and China at 15%.
| Game | Estimated wishlists (Aug 2025) |
|---|---|
| Hollow Knight: Silksong | 4.8 million |
| Battlefield 6 | 2.8 million |
| ARC Raiders | 2.5 million |
| Dying Light: The Beast | 2.3 million |
| Borderlands 4 | 1.8 million |
Source: Alinea Analytics, August 2025.
The list shows wishlisting and pre-ordering pulling apart. Battlefield 6 reached 2.8 million wishlists, yet 657,000 Steam buyers had already pre-purchased for about $38 million, so many fans skipped the wishlist and bought outright. Borderlands 4 landed at 1.8 million, held down partly because its established base pre-orders instead of wishlisting.
Genre overlap drove some of the demand. Among ARC Raiders wishlisters, 37% had played Helldivers 2 on Steam. Interest at this scale feeds the live tracking around Crimson Desert and other high-profile launches.
Steam Next Fest Wishlist Benchmarks
Chris Zukowski surveyed 182 developers after the February 2026 Steam Next Fest. The strongest predictor of wishlists earned was how many a game already held going in, with a Spearman correlation of 0.825. Momentum compounds.
| Wishlists 1 day before the fest | 30th pct. | Median earned | 70th pct. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–999 | 179 | 322 | 485 |
| 1,000–9,999 | 549 | 1,006 | 1,722 |
| 10,000–99,999 | 2,584 | 5,215 | 9,633 |
| 100,000+ | 9,989 | 12,882 | 27,661 |
Source: Chris Zukowski / How To Market A Game, February 2026 Steam Next Fest survey.
Demo timing mattered too. Games that launched a demo well before the fest earned about 2.5 times the wishlists of those launching a demo during it. On demo quality, Zukowski’s median demo conversion rate, the share of demo players who also wishlisted, was 16.33%, with the 30th percentile at 12% and the 70th at 20%.
Discovery still runs partly off Steam, as this look at itch.io for indie games shows. Across every dataset here, a wishlist is a signal to watch, not a sale to bank.
FAQ
What is a good Steam wishlist conversion rate?
The median wishlist-to-first-week-sales ratio was 0.15x for games with 25,000+ launch wishlists, per GameDiscoverCo (Sept 2024–Aug 2025). Regular-priced games above $10 sat lower at 0.10x. Results ranged from ten times below to twenty times above the median.
How many wishlists did Hollow Knight: Silksong have?
Silksong held an estimated 4.8 million wishlists in August 2025, the most of any 2025 game, per Alinea Analytics. Its top markets were the United States at 20% and China at 15% of wishlists.
Do more wishlists mean a higher conversion rate?
For large games, yes. Alinea Analytics found titles with 500,000+ launch wishlists converted 19% of wishlisters to buyers within a day, 26% within a week, and 32% within a month (H1 2025). Smaller games convert at lower rates.
What do Reddit developers get wrong about Steam Next Fest visibility?
A common Reddit claim is that recent wishlist velocity now outweighs total wishlists. Zukowski’s February 2026 survey shows total pre-fest wishlists correlate slightly stronger (r=0.825) with wishlists earned than two-week velocity (r=0.819).
How many wishlists can a demo earn at Steam Next Fest?
It scales with what a game brings in. Zukowski’s February 2026 survey put the median at 322 wishlists earned for games entering under 1,000 wishlists, rising to 12,882 for those entering with 100,000+.
Sources
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/the-state-of-steam-wishlist-conversions
https://alineaanalytics.substack.com/p/silksong-has-48-million-steam-wishlists
https://howtomarketagame.com/2025/03/26/benchmarks-how-many-wishlists-can-i-get-from-steam-next-fest/
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