I know I know I write about wishlists a lot. But, if you are a heart surgeon you have to talk about blood a lot too. Pre-release, wishlists are an integral factor in Steam visibility. After release, total sales are the most important factor.
Sometimes people misinterpret my extensive writing of wishlists as a sign that the raw wishlist count is the only factor that matters.
It is not.
Just having a huge wishlists number at the launch of your game (for both Early Access and regular) does not mean you will become a millionaire game designer who never has to work again. It will not. There is no way that we can just look at one number and determine success.
However, some folks have started saying “Well actually, ‘Wishlist Velocity’ is more important than total wishlists in determining success.”
In today’s post I am going to describe what “Wishlist Velocity” is whether or not it is a good indicator of potential success.
TL;DR: Wishlist Velocity, just like total wishlists, is a good indicator, but not the only thing that will tell you if your game will succeed, no number will do that.
What is wishlist Velocity?
Wishlist Velocity generally refers to Number of Wishlists / Time
Time can be any measure. Such as “Hey during Steam Next Fest my Wishlist Velocity was 300/day”
Or
“During the summer of 2023, my wishlist velocity was 10,000 wishlists per month.”
Now why is velocity so important in determining your success?
If you were to present me with 2 games and asked me which would sell better:
- Game #1 Has 100,000 wishlists and has had a Steam coming soon page live for 10 years
- Game #2 Has 50,000 wishlists and launched their coming soon page 1 month ago.
Although 100,000 wishlists is very important, I would say Game #2 will sell better than game #1.
Why? Because Game #2 shows excitement!
Also if you do the math, Game #1 indicates that it earns about 10,000 per year. That is good, but that is nowhere near as exciting as 50,000 in a month. Game #2 shows that something viral happened. Something so exciting that thousands of people shared and talked about the game. People are REALLY excited about Game #2.
Here are some rules that help you understand this:
Rule 1: Some games are just more exciting than others
A while ago I wrote a post about how some games are bowling balls and others are feathers. On my Discord, I have a channel called #share-your-numbers where people can post the actual results of marketing activities. Often 2 different games will be in the same festival with nearly the same level of featuring but earn wildly different wishlists numbers by the end of the festival.
Some games just interest people more than others. Maybe it is the hook, the genre, the graphics, the story, the capsule, or the trailer. Whatever the reason, there is some alchemy that makes some games more attractive to shoppers than others. That is what I mean by “excitement.”
And with more excitement means more wishlists at a faster rate.
Rule 2: Games that earn more typically had better wishlist velocity
I keep a detailed list of indie game marketing benchmarks.
In one of my surveys I asked developers with released games how fast their wishlists came in pre-release during a period when they were doing no active marketing. I also asked how much money they earned since they launched.
These were the aggregated findings of my survey:
Remember, the Diamond, Gold, Silver, Bronze ratings are based on revenue NOT the wishlists rate. That is why you see a lot of overlap in the wishlist / week range. Sometimes a game earned 300 wishlists / week and only sold enough to earn gold tier, while another game with the same wishlist / week rate earned a lot more and got Diamond Tier.
Rule 3: Games that earned wishlists at a higher rate also had a higher conversion rate
Simon Carless did a similar study where he looked at total wishlist conversion and revenue. Here is the benchmark data from Simon’s study:
Basically what he found is that top-selling games had higher wishlist conversion rates.
Ipso Facto: High wishlist velocity PROBABLY means that people are excited about your game and will probably buy it
If you cross reference Rule #2 and Rule #3 that means that not only do best sellers EARN more wishlists than most games, they also CONVERT better. They have the best of both worlds. It seems obvious when you hear it but games that are best sellers just perform better in every metric we track. When a game is awesome looking people are more excited to wishlist it, and they are more excited to hand over their money when it launches.
That explains why Steam revenue looks like a hockey stick.
I think one of the biggest problems indies have when trying to get visibility is they are just making games that aren’t interesting to the typical Steam shopper. It can be a number of factors: either they can’t explain the hook, or the hook isn’t that interesting, or a genre that just isn’t popular.
“Oh, my hook? It is a RPG set in a medieval world, but there is this amazingly interesting twist …. there are dragons!”
That is basically every single fantasy story and just because you say “amazingly interesting” doesn’t make it so.
Players have to be interested in a game before they are going to wishlist it and DEFINITELY before they are going to buy it. And it isn’t just how you describe the game. The game itself has to be interesting.
Rule 4: Total wishlist count is just one indicator of possible success
There is no one number to predict success. Even Valve, which has total access to every metric for every game on Steam and decades of sales history, cannot predict an individual game’s success.
For instance, in my experience, games with about 100,000 wishlists might be a contender in the eyes of Valve to be featured in the Steam Popup upon release.
HOWEVER, because Valve does not trust wishlists as a standalone metric, if you take your 100K wishlist game and ask for the popup featuring, they will typically reply with this message: “We’ll monitor the launch and make a call on whether it makes sense to run it.”
I know and have seen the data where games launch with 100K wishlists. Valve watches how many copies it sells and then a few hours later, decide to feature the game in the popup.
If there was one number that could predict success, Valve would use it and tell you whether you deserve that Popup before your game launches. But the raw number of wishlists and the raw wishlist velocity is not enough. They are indicators of potential, but they are not infallible. The only number Valve trusts is dollars earned. So for big decisions, Valve waits to see if your game actually generates money.
Why total wishlists are still important
So why can’t we just ignore raw wishlist count if velocity is so important?
There are still many widgets within Steam that rely on raw wishlists and it would be a huge loss if you didn’t have enough wishlists to appear in them:
- Popular upcoming (typically needs 5000-7000 wishlists)
- Steam Popup is generally around 100,000 wishlists
- If you get 1,000,000 you are probably in consideration for the top banner.
Even if your game has an awesome 700 wishlist / week velocity it would still take you almost 3 years to collect 100,000 wishlists organically (aka, not counting any big marketing beats like Steam Next Fest or Streamer Coverage).
Also, remember that wishlists do have a functional purpose. Every person who wishlists your game will get an email when you launch and when you discount the price 20% or more. Those notifications are HUGE.
Also, nobody knows their conversion rate until they launch. So postmortems sometimes suffer from a hindsight-is 20/20 bias. You don’t know if you will have an awesome 20% conversion rate or a lackluster 5% conversion rate. To insure your launch against a potentially underperforming 5% conversion rate, you should try and collect as many wishlists as you can. It gives you more wiggle room.
For instance, some widgets (like New and Trending) are based on raw dollars earned. Consider these two scenarios:
- Scenario 1) 7000 wishlists at launch with 5% conversion rate = 350 sales (x$10) = $3,500
- Scenario 2) 30,000 wishlists at launch with 5% conversion rate = 1500 sales (x$10) = $15,000
I don’t know the exact revenue line that is required to appear in New & Trending (the algorithm is a secret) but the game in Scenario #2 has a much better chance of getting into it. The game in Scenario 2 just had a better chance to earn because it had more wishlists.
A game launch is like a rocket launch. You need both a huge engine that can increase your velocity enough to escape Earth’s gravitational pull (wishlist velocity) but you also need a lot of fuel to maintain that high velocity (raw wishlist count). You need both metrics to be good, and both metrics help explain how your launch might go.
OR some third factor could fly in unexpectedly and cause the rocket to explode on the launch pad.
Why wishlist velocity might not be a good indicator of success
Even if your wishlist count is high, and the velocity is high, your game could still underperform at launch.
I have seen games underperform for any of these reasons because they weren’t apparent in the marketing:
- Controls were “janky” which couldn’t be seen in the marketing.
- The game was marketed as one genre, but gameplay was actually a different one.
- There was a major bug or server crash that prevented people from playing or caused a loss of data.
- The business implemented some crazy DRM or account login requirements (see Electronic Arts or Sony’s Helldivers 2 debacles).
- The game lacks the “depth” that other games in the genre have.
- The game is repetitive after the first hour.
- The game is “short” (I know that shouldn’t matter, but Steam players have expectations).
- Bad writing or shallow characters for narrative games.
- The narrative is linear and players complain that “my choices don’t matter” for visual novels.
- Bad technical performance that causes the game to lag with a low frame rate on all but the beefiest hardware.
- Lack of critical options such as remappable controls, Sound / FX muting, translation, ultra widescreen support, keyboard, mouse, gamepad support.
Why the problem is not because wishlists get old
Indie developers are always worried about wishlists “getting old” or shoppers “getting tired of hearing about their game.” A lot of developers think the importance of wishlist velocity and the inconsistency of the raw wishlist number as a sign that wishlists “get old.”
For example, this is a typical r/gamedev post:
“8 years ago I started work on my dream game. I collected 50,000 wishlists, and my game still failed. My wishlists got old!”
So do you see the flaw in the logic? Again this is a combination of Rule #2 and Rule #3.
So this theoretical game that collected wishlists for 8 years actually only earned 6250 wishlists per year.
That is a wishlist velocity of 120 wishlists / week (could be even less because we don’t know what big promotions the developers did.) That puts the game in silver status, but could be even lower.
Yes 50,000 is high but the developers got there after grinding wishlists for a LONG TIME. That indicates that shoppers weren’t that interested in the game to begin with. So when the game went to launch the same general apathy that made people wishlist the game at a lower rate meant people also bought it at a lower rate.
The low sales numbers are not because the wishlists got old, it was because nobody was that excited about the game in the first place. But because the game was in development for so long, the total wishlist count looked good.
Also
I wrote about Zero Sievert that had a very consistent conversion rate over its 1.5 year Steam page.
At GDC 2024 I even asked some of the people working at Valve about wishlists “getting old.” They said the only times they really saw it happening is if the game changed drastically in graphics or genre from the games initial Steam page announcement vs launch. They also said if the game launched with a price that seemed inconsistent with the games original art, it could look as if the wishlists “got old.”
My thought is that in most cases, shoppers don’t “get tired” of a game, the problem is that they were “always tired” of the game, but it was too hard to see that because the game was in development for so long.
Final advice
So whenever you are trying to predict the launch of your game consider the benchmarks I have been collecting. It isn’t purely the wishlist count, it also isn’t purely the wishlist velocity.
Nobody can predict success for something as ephemeral as games because it is so hard to figure out what is fun or to quantify it.
Predicting the success of a game is like those hurricane path of destruction maps. We know GENERALLY how your launch will go by looking at lots of numbers, but until you actually launch, you don’t know for sure. In hurricanes it is called the “Cone of Uncertainty.” And the cone is bigger as you get further into the future because there are more and more factors that can affect the path it takes.
Here are the constellation of metrics and “gut feels” that I look at to determine whether a game MIGHT be a feather instead of a rock. Again, don’t look at one of these numbers as a sign you have something hot. Instead, if many of these bullets apply to your game, you MIGHT have something hot on your hands.
- The game is sitting at a high total wishlist count (30,000-100,000+)
- The velocity has consistently been fairly high (200-300+ wishlists per week for months) even when you aren’t actively marketing the game. A 1 week spike of 200 does not count. It must be consistent even if you aren’t actively promoting.
- The Steam discovery queue features your game for 2 weeks multiple times and you got thousands of wishlists from it. For more info see this post on the Discovery Queue.
- The median playtime of the demo is 60+ minutes (The average doesn’t matter because it is too inconsistent).
- Steamers play the demo OVER and OVER on their stream across several separate sessions. Some Streamers even dedicate a specific day of the week to for a weekly run through of your game demo.
- Fans are a little too enthusiastic and are making fan art, or cosplay, or starting clandestine Discord servers, or getting a bit angry if you aren’t giving regular updates. All this happens without you prompting them or incentivizing them to do it.
- Players are getting aggressive with your code: they hack the game to add levels or mod in new rules or to fix gameplay bugs, they try to steal the source code and upload it to a pirating site, or some bad guys clone your game and try to get it to market before you can. (these sound awful but are secretly blessings in disguise because they show insane interest).
- The frequency you are accepted into festivals is quite high (how high is high? Just check my discord for the #general-even-chat channel and see people posting whether they got accepted or not.)
- You apply with your trailer to the summer prime-time festivals (like summer game fest) and the organizers decide to feature your game trailer for free because they think your game looks so awesome.
- Your TikToks and Tweets go viral with 1,000,000+ views and lead to thousands of wishlists.
- You can post on r/games and are upvoted to the r/all (the front page of Reddit) and the mods don’t pull your post because they think your game looks so awesome too (this yields 10,000+ wishlists).
- IGN agrees to host your trailer on their YouTube channel, and then LadBible, and Gamespot, and a bunch of other channels do the same.