Steam Wishlist Conversion Rate: 2026 Benchmarks

A game that launches with 10,000 Steam wishlists sells, at the median, 1,700 to 2,000 copies in its first week, and over its whole life converts somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of that list into buyers. The honest range is far wider than the median: real games with six-figure wishlist counts have converted at 1 percent, and other real games have converted above 30 percent, and the difference between those outcomes is settled by whether the game delivers what its page promised, not by the size of the list. This piece collects the verified benchmarks, separates the two different numbers people call conversion, and gives you arithmetic you can plan a launch with. A disclosure before we start: this blog belongs to Egmatic, a no-code 2D editor in pre-alpha, and what that has to do with conversion is near the end.

If you are still building the count rather than forecasting it, start with how to get your first 100 Steam wishlists; this article is the sequel, the part about what the list is worth once the game is out.

Quick answer#

Plan on the low end of every row and treat everything above it as upside. The rest of the article explains where each number comes from and where it does not apply.

Two numbers get called conversion, and they are not the same#

The first is the launch-week multiple: your wishlist balance on release day, divided into total units sold by the end of week one. GameDiscoverCo has surveyed this twice, in late 2021 and again in April 2024, asking developers what multiple of their launch wishlists the first week produced, counting wishlist conversions and organic buyers together. Both surveys landed on a median of about 0.2 across all game sizes, and the 2024 pass put games launching above 10,000 wishlists slightly lower, at 0.17, once tiny hobbyist titles drop out of the sample. For revenue forecasting this is the number you want, because it counts every sale, including buyers who never wishlisted at all.

The second is cohort conversion, and it is Valve's own data rather than a survey. Steamworks lets any released game download a report that groups players by the month they wishlisted and tracks whether each group has purchased. Divide each month's purchasers by that month's wishlists and you get a per-cohort conversion rate that keeps rising for as long as the game sells. The two developers who have published this data in full landed at very different levels: Song of Iron averaged 8.02 percent across its cohorts three and a half years after launch, and Cosmoteer averaged 19.31 percent. This number tells you about the fit between your game and its audience. It is a diagnosis, not a forecast.

The mistake to avoid is mixing them. A 0.2 launch week and a 10 percent lifetime conversion are not in conflict, because week-one sales include drive-by buyers, discount shoppers and people who never saw the page before release day, while the cohort number patiently counts only the people who raised their hand.

The benchmarks, with their sources#

Two observations belong next to the table. First, the launch-week multiple barely moved between 2021 and 2024 despite the store getting busier, so the older numbers are still usable as planning anchors. Second, the long tail is real: the median game roughly quadruples its launch-week revenue over two years, which is why a soft first week is a diagnosis and not a funeral. What you do in that tail is its own discipline, and our post-launch strategy guide covers it.

Why the range runs from 1 to 40 percent#

Chris Zukowski, who has consulted on the actual numbers for a large set of games, puts it flatly: before you launch, nobody knows whether your game will convert at 1, 3, 5, 10, 20 or 40 percent, because he has seen all of those, and a game that launched with 100,000 wishlists and converted at 1 percent failed, while a 30 percent conversion on a comparable count also exists. Valve does not know either: the developer of Tape To Tape, which launched with 53,000 wishlists, has documented how Valve withheld the launch popup deal until it could verify the conversion rate was high.

What actually settles the number is whether the game keeps the promise the page made. Song of Iron gathered 89,082 wishlists with AAA-grade visuals, and converted every cohort at around 8 percent regardless of when people joined, because the controls and difficulty could not match what the trailers implied; players who finished it liked it, and the ones who bounced early returned it. Cosmoteer ran a four-year page and converted at more than double that rate, every cohort alike, because the game fit what its audience came for. The lesson generalizes: conversion slices flat across the whole timeline of when people wishlisted. If the game is missing something, every cohort is missing it equally.

Three more findings from the same cohort data deserve wider knowledge:

• Fresher is not better. Song of Iron's best-converting month except the 54-wishlist launch day was June 2020, fifteen months before release. Its worst month was Next Fest, June 2021, three months before release, at 5.51 percent, despite those wishlists being the newest.
• Demos reveal, they do not cause. The Next Fest demo month converting lowest is not an argument against demos. Players tried it, saw the issues, and waited; the reviews at launch confirmed what the demo had already shown. The demo was the canary, not the cause.
• Where the wishlist came from matters. The 54 wishlists from launch day, mostly friends and followers of the developer, converted at 15.38 percent, the highest of any month. Lists built from creator coverage and targeted placement outconvert lists built from broad festival browse traffic.

Community reads we run point the same direction. The r/gamedev marketing breakdown that spent $11,000 starting from a base of 3,000 wishlists, and the zero-budget post-mortem that crawled to 2,000 wishlists in eleven months, are both stories about list-building cost. What the list earned at launch was settled elsewhere, by the game.

How many wishlists you actually need#

Invert the multiple. To sell 1,000 units in launch week at the median 0.2 you need about 5,000 wishlists; at a conservative 0.1 you need 10,000. This inversion is the entire logic behind the long-standing advice to reach 7,000 to 10,000 wishlists before launching, and behind publishers pushing 30,000 or more, which is a buffer that prices in a weak conversion.

Zukowski's worked example shows why the buffer matters. A $19 game converting at 3 percent with 7,000 wishlists grosses $3,990 in its window and stays invisible. The same game with 30,000 wishlists grosses $17,100, clears the rough $10,000 week-one revenue bar that feeds Steam's New and Trending selection, and buys a visibility boost it did not earn by converting well. Valve has said publicly that there is no wishlist threshold for featuring; once a game is on sale, what its systems read is revenue. The wishlists are only the height the revenue falls from.

Velocity beats totals here. A game collecting around 15,000 wishlists a year is on a hot trajectory in Zukowski's reading, while 30,000 accumulated across seven years of page life is a weak signal, because it means the market never sped up. When you record the number for launch day, record how fast it got there too; the launch day checklist has a slot for exactly that baseline.

What a wishlist still buys you after the count#

Conversion is the number people fixate on, but the list earns its keep in three other ways.

The first is mechanical: pressing release sends an automatic email to every wishlister, the single most reliable conversion event a small game gets, and Valve's Coming Soon documentation adds the reassurance that wishlists barely decay, with a player who joined two years out buying at close to the rate of one who joined two weeks out. The second is visibility before launch: games featured in Popular Upcoming collect on the order of 750 to 2,000 wishlists a day, and weekly additions are one of the signals Steam reads when allocating that placement. The third is the long tail: with the median game reaching 3.16 times its launch-week revenue by the end of year one, a wishlist that waits for a sale still tends to pay eventually, which is why the deletes, about 9 percent in the one public count, are the only wishlists truly lost.

Zukowski's analogy is the honest summary: wishlists are how high you stand when you drop the game. A feather dropped from any height floats; a bowling ball dropped from any height does not. Most games are somewhere between, and the cohort data is how you find out which.

Reading your own conversion after launch#

1. Download the wishlist report from Steamworks for your released game. It groups players by the month they wishlisted and tracks purchases, which is the cohort data the public case studies were built from.
2. Compute per-cohort conversion and watch the average, not single months. Song of Iron's months bounced between 5 and 10 percent around an 8 percent average with a 2 percent standard deviation; a bad month is weather, a bad average is climate.
3. Divide week-one units by the wishlist balance you recorded at launch and compare against the 0.1 to 0.2 band. Below 0.05 means the promise gap is real; above 0.3 means the game is outperforming its page and the page is the thing to fix.
4. Cross-check with reviews, which lag but do not lie about scale. One thousand reviews typically correlates with $150,000 or more in revenue; Tower Factory's 329 reviews in month one was exactly the slow-build shape that reached 52,000 copies over a year.
5. Treat conversion as the input to the next decision, not a verdict. Low conversion with healthy retention points at the page and the demo; healthy conversion with no traffic points at distribution, which is where the zero-budget marketing walkthrough picks up. Our analytics guide covers the store dashboard this data comes from.

Common mistakes#

• Forecasting with a single rate. Multiplying wishlists by a flat 10 percent produces a number with false precision; the observed range is ten times wide, so model low, median and high before you spend against the forecast.
• Believing old wishlists convert worse. The public cohort data shows a flat trendline across seventeen months, and the theory survives only because the final pre-launch months convert best of all, as creator pushes and Popular Upcoming land. That is a sampling illusion, not decay.
• Blaming the demo. A demo month converting low told you what launch reviews would have told you anyway, earlier and cheaper.
• Buying wishlists. Purchased accounts do not buy games, so the release email lands in dead inboxes and the number stops meaning anything. The first-100 guide covers this trap in full.
• Comparing your launch to outliers. Games with comparable exposure have ranged from 22 times the median conversion down to near zero. Your comparison set is your own baseline, recorded on day one.

How Egmatic fits#

Conversion is settled by whether the game keeps the page's promise, and for a small team that is a shipping problem more than a marketing one: the demo has to be cut, the update that answers the reviews has to go out, and the web build a stranger can click has to exist. Egmatic is a no-code 2D editor with a ship layer being built around exactly that loop, so those are movements of one tool instead of three projects, with no code and no backend to maintain. The AI in the editor executes under your direction and every file stays yours. We are pre-alpha, we do not announce dates, and the waitlist at egmatic.com is the room where the specifics get decided.

Ship the update that converts interest.

Wishlists convert when the game keeps its promise, and keeping that promise is a shipping loop: the demo cut, the update, the web build. Egmatic is a no-code 2D editor with a ship layer that treats those as one movement. Reply on the waitlist with the slowest link in your launch loop; requests sent during pre-alpha are the ones that steer the build.

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Conclusion#

Plan on 0.1 to 0.2 times your wishlist count in launch week and 5 to 10 percent lifetime conversion, hold the full range of 1 to 40 percent in your head as the honest uncertainty, and let your own cohort data replace both once it exists. The count is worth building because it becomes an email, a visibility signal and a slow compounding tail, and the conversion is worth measuring because it is the truest public answer to whether the game matched its promise. A list you grew honestly converts at whatever rate the game deserves, and the numbers here exist so that on launch day you are reading results, not hoping for them.

Sources#

1. GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless — Revealed: the state of Steam wishlist conversions and long tail in 2024, April 15, 2024 (survey medians 0.2 and 0.17 for 10,000-plus games; spread from a tenth of the median to five times it; long-tail revenue multipliers 1.39x month one, 3.16x year one, 4.2x year two)
2. Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game — Do wishlists matter any more?, January 29, 2024 (conversion range of 1 to 40 percent observed across consulted games; the 100,000-wishlist game that converted at 1 percent; publisher buffer arithmetic at 3 percent and $19; Popular Upcoming yields; Valve on the absence of a featuring threshold)
3. Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game — Do wishlists get old?, January 27, 2025 (Song of Iron: 89,082 wishlists, 7,928 deletes, 8.02 percent average cohort conversion with 2 percent standard deviation, 5.51 percent Next Fest month, 15.38 percent launch-day month; Cosmoteer at 19.31 percent; Tape To Tape popup-deal verification; flat trendline across cohort ages)
4. Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game — Leftover research from 2025, December 15, 2025 (Tower Factory: 6.8 percent first-month conversion without a launch discount, 13.7 percent at one year, 52,000 copies, 329 first-month reviews; the 1,000-review and $150,000 correlation)
5. Valve — Coming Soon, Steamworks Documentation (automatic release email to wishlisters; long-lead wishlists purchase at rates similar to fresh ones)
6. Valve — Wishlist reporting, Steamworks Documentation (the per-cohort wishlist and purchase data this article's method section describes)
7. Community reads run by our team, September 2026: the r/gamedev breakdown of an $11,000 marketing campaign that started from 3,000 wishlists, and zero-budget post-mortems reporting roughly 2,000 wishlists after eleven months of devlogs