How many wishlists should I have when I launch my game?

How many wishlists does it take to get into the Personalized Calendar?

The following is an estimate based on June 2026 analysis. The Personal Calendar tool is very new and I will continue to monitor it.  However in short it looks like for the default thresholds to appear on the of the Personalized Calendar are as follows:

Tier	Wishlists required to get featuring on the Personalized Calendar
💎 Diamond – Placement in the Top 10 filtering	90,000-360,000
🥇 Gold – Placement in Top 50	50,000-120,000
🥈Silver – Placement in default Top 100	8000-60,000
🥉 Bronze – Placement in the Top 250	5,000-32,000

What is the personal calendar?

The Personal Calendar is a widget that is the first, and lowest barrier to entry to get REAL exposure by Steam to your game in the run up to launch. You can view the calendar here

2 Months before your set release date, your game is eligible (but not guaranteed) to appear in the Personal Calendar. Whether you appear seems to depend on the number of wishlists (and by correlation followers), the other games launching at the same time as yours, and your tags. Also the calendar is re-calculated every day. Because of these complicated factors there is a real range of wishlists / followers that games have when they appear in these widgets.

By default the Personal Calendar shows 100 games. See below. 

To test the benchmarks, I sampled all 100 games that appeared on this list and cross referenced how many wishlists they had at the time. Here are the results presented with ranges of 30th, Median, 70th percentile. I also show the highest and lowest outliers.

This chart shows Follower counts because a game’s follower count is public data. I use a very rough 10 wishlists / 1 follower ratio. Note some genres like Friendslop have a much higher 40 wishlists / 1 follower ratio. But 10 is still my default estimation.

Because this is the default sort and there are so many games, I say the Silver Tier visibility range is 8000-60,000 Wishlists. The more wishlists you have, the more likely you are to appear in more Personalized Calendars. 

If you really want to increase your chances at appearing in the Calendar, you want to have enough wishlists that you could appear on the calendar even if people filter it down to 10, 25, or 50 games. In the following chart, list the ranges of games that appeared in the Personal Calendar at various filtering ranges. 

Survivorship bias

It is quite surprising how few games appear in Personal Calendar considering how many games launch every day on Steam. To try and figure out why, I used the Steam DB calendar tool which doens’t apply as much wishlist and tag filtering as Steam’s Personal Calendar. Then I cross-referenced to see what games appeared in Steam DB’s calendar but not the Personal Calendar. It could give better insight as to what Follower ranges were too low even for Steam’s 250-500 game ranges.

Note the 30th percentile range is a quite high 18,000 wishlists. I think the reason has to do with tag filtering out games from my personal calendar. I don’t think too much can be read into this. I just include this chart so people don’t accuse me of “Survivorship Bias.”

How visibility can I earn from the Personal Calendar?

At the time of this writing the tool has been out for less than 1 month so please take this data with a grain of salt. 

Data supplied by the game Focus Grove 

Source	Impression	Click through rate	Visits
Pre June 2026 Popular Upcoming	1,297,384	0.81%	10,538
Personal Calendar	79,820	33.83%	27,001

Another developer from Starforged Legacy shared similar numbers

Source	Impression	Click through rate	Visits
Pre June 2026 Popular Upcoming	704,226	1.56%	10,985
Personal Calendar	105,413	31.26%	32,952

Note how in both cases the games get fewer impressions than Popular Upcoming but many more visits. 

How many wishlists can I earn?

Early estimates from games like Don’t Let it Starve seem to indicate 1000-3000 / day closer to launch. 

I have seen other games in the calendar that are more than 1 month out earn 400-800 wishlists per day.

I don’t have a broad based sample, and we are still in the early honeymoon period with the tool so I don’t have definite numbers. I will update this as more come in. 

What about popular upcoming?

The 10-game long date-ranked chart was the reason the common recommendation was to gather 5000-7000 wishlists before launch.
In a June 2026 update, Valve reported that Popular Upcoming was changing to have a higher bar of entry.

I surveyed a day in June and these were the wishlist ranges.

• 8470 – 30th Percentile
• 13,270 – Median
• 20,000 – 70th Percentile.

Note, these numbers aren’t unatainable. I saw some sub 7000 wishlists games in the list post change.

However, I noticed some games with huge wishlist counts appeared in Popular Upcoming months before their release. I am calling those Diamond tier games. The following benchmarks reflect estimated ranges. 

Tier	Wishlists required to get featuring on the Personalized Calendar
💎 Diamond – Extended placement in Popular Upcoming (2 months+ before release)	300,000 Wishlists+
🥇 Gold – 1 month before launch	10,000-20,000 Wishlists
🥈Silver – Brief placement	7000-10,000 Wishlists
🥉 Bronze – Very rare and short periods on PU	<6,000 Wishlists

How long do you appear in popular upcoming

Before the PU and Personal Calendar changes, even top performing games got 1 to 2 days on the chart. However the changes reduced the number of games that were eligible and increased the duration that many games had in the chart.

See this chart that samples Popular Upcoming every day in the transition between algorithms. See in June how the number of games that are new per day drop from 10 down to 2. Also note the duration goes way up.

I don’t have 7000 wishlists, what should I do?

So your launch is a couple months away and you are not yet at 7000 wishlists. Should you delay your launch? Should you cancel the game? What should you do?

There are two cases: you are ALMOST to 7000 or you are way way far away.

Almost to 7000

If you are within about 1000 wishlists of that mysterious threshold, and you have some time, wait. Potentially push back your launch a few months. Then do a marketing blitz for wishlsits. The following actions can actually increase wishlists in a short period of time:

• Send a preview build out to as many streamers as you can and hope they play it on stream.
• Post a 30 second trailer to Reddit’s r/games, r/pcmasterrace, or r/gaming and use the “I quit my job, followed my dreams” style post and hope for the best. You can read about how Laysara: Summit Kingdom did this here.
• Pay for ads on Facebook, Reddit, or Tiktok (don’t do Twitter ads, they don’t work.) In my experience you can earn 1 wishlist per $1. You do the math if this is worth it.
• Look to see if there are any festivals in the short term and enter. Each festival can earn you about 1000-3000 wishlists.

Hopefully this marketing blitz gets you over the line.

No where close to 7000

However, if you are sitting at 3000 wishlists despite at least 6 months of trying EVERYTHING to get your game seen and nothing seems to be working, it might be time to just release it.

You could spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads or paid influencers to get you up there, but I don’t think it will do it. If people aren’t wishlisting your game that much despite all your marketing effort, it probably indicates soft interest for your game.

In my experience, it is probably best just to release the game, save your money, and spend it on your next one. It is better to spend money on a new project than spend money on ads for a game that just doesn’t excite people.

You will make more games!

Other tips and tricks

Here are some other tips and tricks for managing popular upcoming:

Don’t miss your release date

Valve is serious about the date you set for your release date. A couple weeks before your date you will get an email from Valve with subject line “Preparing <game> for release on <date>.” That is their final warning to make sure you really are going to release. You can change it if you need more time but once you are in the last week, there is no changing it without opening a support ticket. And if you do appear on popular upcoming, or overrun your date, there is no more chances to appear on popular upcoming.

You can appear on popular upcoming once and only once. Valve is very strict about this. No matter how sad your story is, no matter how good your excuse is, Valve will not give you a second chance. Even if you get a new publisher. So don’t let your release date pass.

Years ago some “scammy” developers figured out that if you appear on Popular upcoming, then immediately change your release date back 1 more week you can stay on the list. And then again, and then again, and repeat this process for MONTHS. Valve has since put an end to this. Don’t try to fool Valve.

Front of the pack

You can check to see which other games you will be competing with months before your release by going to be on popular upcoming. Head over to to the page called upcoming Steam (link). Look for games that will be releasing around the same time as yours.

Check again in the weeks before release. If there are some releasing the same day, look them up on SteamDB. Click the “Information” tab and look for this section.

It will tell you the precise day and time they release. If possible, change your official release date and time to be 1 hour ahead of theirs. Sometimes getting to the top 10 Popular Upcoming comes down to hours.

Early Access

Early Access games actually appear in the Personal Calendar Twice! Once at EA launch and a second time at the 1.0 release. Yes that is great visibility. But I don’ think it is great enough of an advantage that developers should do EA for it. EA is reserved for experienced teams making games with endlessly replayable games. Please don’t do EA for this double dip.

WARNING: The rule of 1 and only 1 appearance on Popular Upcoming applies to Early Access games too. I know many indie developers who treat early access like some sort of “soft launch” and release their game to Early Access with out many wishlists.

This is a big mistake! You just surrendered your only chance at getting on popular upcoming. You still should try to get a minimum of 7000 wishlists before you release to Early Access. That is your launch.