Wishlists vs Followers on Steam: Which Number Actually Predicts Launch Revenue

If you're checking your Steam page every morning, you're probably watching one number: wishlists. Followers feel like a vanity stat, the thing your mom and your discord regulars click. That intuition was correct in 2022. It isn't correct now.

After Steam's 2025 follower-curation changes, the signal value of these two metrics swapped roles for a meaningful slice of games. One of them is still lying to you. Which one depends on where you are in your launch cycle, and what kind of audience you've built.

I'll walk through what each number actually measures, how they map to day-one revenue, and a decision tree for which one to optimize for right now.

What each metric is actually measuring

Both numbers get treated as proxies for "people who care." They're not the same thing. They measure different intents, captured at different friction levels, and Steam treats them differently in its algorithm.

Wishlists: a purchase queue with weak commitment

A wishlist is a buy-later signal. The user is saying "remind me when this is cheaper, released, or both." The barrier to wishlist is one click from a store page. The barrier to remove it is roughly zero, and most people never bother. That's why wishlists inflate over time, and why old wishlists convert at a fraction of new ones.

Chris Zukowski's data at howtomarketagame.com has shown for years that wishlist age matters more than raw count. A wishlist added in the last 30 days converts at launch maybe 5 to 10 times better than one that's been sitting for 18 months. So when someone tells you they launched with 40,000 wishlists, the question to ask is: how many of those were added in the final quarter before launch?

Followers: an attention subscription

A follow is a notification opt-in. The user is saying "I want updates from this developer or game." It's a higher-intent action because it's a recurring commitment, not a passive bookmark. Pre-2025, follows were also rarer and harder to nudge users toward, which made the count look weak compared to wishlists.

The 2025 changes shifted this. Steam now surfaces followed-developer activity more aggressively in the home queue and in the "What's New" feed, and it weights follower velocity into some discovery surfaces. A follow now generates more downstream impressions than it used to. Which means a follower in 2026 is doing more work for you than a follower in 2023.

The friction gap matters

Wishlists are cheap and noisy. Followers are expensive and clean. If you have 10,000 wishlists and 200 followers, you have a lot of casual interest and a tiny actual fanbase. If you have 3,000 wishlists and 2,000 followers, you have a smaller but qualitatively different audience: people who want to hear from you.

How each number correlates with day-one revenue

This is where most takes get sloppy. "Wishlists predict revenue" is true in aggregate and useless for any individual game. The correlation depends heavily on genre, price point, and how the wishlists were acquired.

Wishlist conversion is not a constant

The commonly cited 10% day-one conversion is a midpoint of a wide distribution. I've seen sims and city builders hit 25% on launch day. I've seen narrative games convert at 4%. The variance is driven by:

• How recently the wishlists were added (recent > old, by a lot).
• Whether the wishlists came from Next Fest, a viral tweet, a Steam front-page feature, or paid traffic. Next Fest wishlists convert well. Paid social wishlists often convert at half the rate.
• Launch discount depth. A 10% launch discount roughly doubles wishlist conversion versus no discount.
• Genre price elasticity. A $25 strategy game converts wishlists differently than a $10 roguelike.

If you're modeling launch revenue off a flat wishlist-to-sale ratio, you're guessing. You're just guessing with a spreadsheet.

Follower-to-buyer rates are more stable

Followers convert at roughly 30 to 50% on launch week, and the variance is narrower. This makes sense: a follower already raised their hand twice (once to find you, once to commit to updates). Game Developer's post-mortems on indie launches (gamedeveloper.com) keep surfacing the same pattern. Studios with strong follower counts relative to wishlists tend to overperform launch revenue projections. Studios with bloated wishlist counts and thin followers tend to underperform.

The reason: followers are a proxy for the part of your audience that will buy at full price in the first 48 hours, write reviews, and tell friends. Wishlists are a proxy for everyone, including people who'll wait for a 75% sale in 2028.

The combined signal beats either alone

The most useful number isn't wishlists or followers. It's the ratio. A healthy indie game heading into launch usually has a wishlist-to-follower ratio between 5:1 and 15:1. Above 20:1 and your wishlists are probably padded with low-intent users. Below 3:1 and you've built a community but haven't reached enough casual browsers to drive a strong launch spike.

The 2025 follower changes and why old benchmarks broke

Before 2025, followers were a quiet metric. They mostly affected whether your news posts got seen by people who already cared. Wishlists were the discoverability engine, because Steam's algorithm heavily weighted wishlist velocity for visibility rounds and Daily Deal placement.

What changed

Steam expanded follower-driven surfaces. Followed developers now appear more often in the home queue. Update posts from followed games get pushed harder. The "Popular Among Friends" and curator-style recommendations also pulled in follower signals more heavily. The practical effect: a follower is now worth more impressions over the lifetime of your store presence than they were two years ago.

Why the old wishlist benchmarks misfire

The classic "you need 7,000 wishlists to hit the Popular Upcoming list" rule of thumb still has some truth, but the list itself drives less traffic than it did in 2022. Steam's discovery has fragmented. More surfaces, more personalization, more weight on engagement signals beyond raw wishlist count. The result: hitting Popular Upcoming with weak followers and recent-wishlist drought doesn't deliver the same launch bump it used to.

I've watched two games in the last 12 months hit 15,000+ wishlists and launch to numbers that would've been embarrassing in 2021. In both cases, the follower count was under 500. The wishlists were old, mostly from a single Next Fest 18 months prior, and the developers had gone dark between fest and launch. Steam noticed. The algorithm noticed. The launch reflected it.

The decision tree: which number to optimize for right now

Stop asking "wishlists or followers" as a general question. The right answer changes based on your stage. Here's how I'd think about it.

Stage 1: Store page is live, 6+ months from launch

Optimize for wishlists. You need to fill the top of the funnel. Followers will come along for the ride if your content cadence is decent, but at this stage you're not trying to convert anyone, you're trying to get on radars. Trailers, gif posts, Next Fest demos (the next one is June 2026), key art that reads at thumbnail size. Volume of new eyeballs is the goal.

Track: weekly wishlist additions, not total wishlists. Total wishlist count at this stage is mostly noise.

Stage 2: 3 to 6 months from launch

Shift focus to followers and to your mailing list. Wishlists are still useful, but the quality of your audience starts to matter more than the quantity. This is when you want to convert passive wishlisters into engaged followers, and engaged followers into mailing list subscribers.

An indie game mailing list is the single most undervalued asset in this stage. Steam owns your wishlists and your followers. You own your mailing list. When you launch, you can email it directly, multiple times, with no algorithmic gatekeeping. Studios that build a list of even 1,000 to 2,000 engaged subscribers regularly outperform launch projections because they have a guaranteed first-day push that doesn't depend on Steam's mood.

Tools worth naming: ConvertKit and Buttondown both work for indie scale. Don't overthink it. A monthly devlog email with one gif, one update, and one ask is enough.

Stage 3: Final 30 days before launch

Now wishlists matter again, but specifically recent wishlists. Steam's launch-day algorithm weights wishlist velocity in the final two weeks heavily. This is when you want a press push, a final Next Fest if your timing aligns, a streamer wave, anything that drives a wishlist spike in the final stretch.

But, and this is the part most people miss: your followers and mailing list are what convert that final-month spike into actual revenue. The wishlist additions get you visibility. The owned audience gets you the day-one sales spike that pushes you into Popular New Releases.

Stage 4: Post-launch

Followers and mailing list, full stop. Wishlists are now a long tail discount-watching pool. Useful, but you can't really influence them much. Your followers and mailing list are what you'll activate for content updates, DLC, your next game. If you only take one thing from this article: the audience you build before launch is the audience that buys your second game. Wishlists don't carry over. Followers and email subscribers do.

What to actually do this week

If you're reading this and you've been tracking wishlists religiously while ignoring followers, here's the concrete shift.

Audit your wishlist-to-follower ratio

Open your Steamworks dashboard. Look at your wishlist count and your follower count. If your ratio is above 20:1, you have a community engagement problem, not a discovery problem. More trailers won't fix it. You need reasons for casual wishlisters to commit further: devlogs, behind-the-scenes posts, a Discord, a demo update cadence.

Start a mailing list this month if you don't have one

This is the single highest-leverage move for any indie 3+ months from launch. Pick a tool, write one email, link it from your Steam page and your social profiles. The first 100 subscribers are the hardest. After that, every devlog grows it organically if your game is interesting.

Look at wishlist additions, not totals, weekly

The total number lies. The weekly delta tells you whether your marketing is working. A game with 30,000 wishlists adding 50 per week is in worse shape than a game with 5,000 wishlists adding 300 per week. The second one is launching into momentum. The first one is launching into a graveyard.

Stop using wishlist count as a launch revenue predictor

If you absolutely need a model, use this: estimate 30% of your followers buy in week one at full price, plus 4 to 8% of your wishlists added in the last 60 days, plus 1 to 3% of older wishlists. Multiply by your price after Steam's cut. That's a more honest range than "wishlists times 10%."

The number you've been tracking isn't necessarily wrong. It's just incomplete. Both wishlists and followers matter. But if you've been ignoring one of them, you've been flying with one eye closed, and after Steam's 2025 changes, that eye is the one with the better view.

Check your ratio today. If it's out of whack, you know what to fix.