Wonder what is normal? Want to know what to expect with your launch? I have created a top to bottom timeline of major milestones and what metrics you can expect to see at each.

The benchmarks in this timeline are divided into 4 tiers of gross lifetime income. For more information about how to use this chart and understand the earning tiers, read this post.

Gross earning tiers

🥉 Bronze: $0 – $10,000
🥈 Silver: $10,001 – $249K
🥇 Gold: $250K – $999K
💎 Diamond: $1 Million+

Coming Soon Page Launch

How many wishlists will I earn when I launch my Steam page?

🥉 100 wishlists
🥈 500 wishlists
🥇 1200 wishlists
💎 7000 wishlists

Research
How many wishlists do you earn when you launch your steam page?
(Study date: August 2022)

Organic Visibility

How many wishlists should I earn on a typical week?


Wishlists earned per week:
🥉 0 – 40
🥈 15 – 120
🥇 100 – 700
💎 300 – 3000

Research
What is a normal click through rate and weekly wishlist earn?
(Study date: August 2022)

Wishlist Deletes

What is a normal number of wishlist deletes?

Important to note that the bigger and more visible your game is, the more likely you will have lots of deletes.

🥉 9% wishlists are deleted
🥈 12.7% wishlists are deleted
🥇 10.5% wishlists are deleted
💎 11.65% wishlists are deleted

Research
What is a normal number of wishlist deletes?

(Study Date September 2022)

Demo Median Playtime

What is a good median playtime for a demo?

If fans can’t stop playing your demo, that is a great sign. If people can’t stand your game, they won’t stick around long. So what is a normal playtime for a demo?

🥉 7 minutes
🥈 18 minutes
🥇 38 minutes
💎 65 minutes

Research
What is a good median play time for a demo? [Benchmark]

Steam Next Fest

How many wishlists can you get during Steam Next Fest

Steam Next Fest occurs 3 times a year and every game is eligible. So how many wishlists can you expect to earn? Here are the results based on a broad based survey:

🥉 Bronze: 0-999
🥈Silver: 1000-6,999

🥇 Gold: 7000-9,999

💎 Diamond: 10,000+

Research
How many wishlists can you earn during Steam Next Fest?
(Study date: February 2025)

Game Launch

How many wishlists should I have at launch?

🥉 <6000
🥈 6000
🥇 30,000
💎 150,000

Research
How many wishlists should I have when I launch my game?
(September 26, 2022)

Discovery Queue

How much launch visibility will the Discovery Queue give me?

Page impressions in the 10 days after launch (% of traffic).

🥉 22,000 (54% of traffic)
🥈 126,000 (45% of traffic)
🥇 250,00 (45% of traffic)
💎 665,000 (32% of traffic)

Research

What is the post launch Discovery Queue
(Study Date: February 2025)

Wishlist conversion rate

How many of my wishlists will convert in the first week?

When you launch, how many of your wishlists will convert to sales.

Conversion Rate as sorted by revenue:
🥉 $1000 = 11.93%
🥈 $10,000 = 20.49%
🥇 $100,000 = 25.35%
💎 $1,000,000 = 27.08%

Conversion Rate as sorted by number of wishlists at launch
< 4999 = 15% (median)
5000-39,999 = 20% (median)
40,000-99,999 = 23% (median)
100,000+ = 25% (median)

Research
(Simon Carless) Steam: the new ‘wishlists to first week sales’ expectations
(Study date: June 2020)

DLC Attach Rate

How well will DLC sell?

For every person who buys your game, a subset of them will go on and buy a copy of your DLC.

Here is the median attach rate for DLC and (median revenue from DLC)

🥉Bronze 1.5% ($80)
🥈Silver 40% ($11,639)
🥇Gold 3.3% ($8,600)
💎Diamond: 18% ($1,069,000)

Research (March 2026)

How much money can you make from DLC?

Reviews

How many sales per review?

This is commonly referred to as the Boxleiter number and is the calculation of the number of sales per review.

Sales / review by release year
2013 – 2017: 79 to 43
2018: 38
2019: 36
2020: 31
2021: 20-55 (31 is median)

Research
(VG Insights) How to Estimate Steam Video Game Sales (Study date: June 2021)
(Simon Carless) How that game sold on Steam, using the NB Number (Study date: August 2020)