How are the vishlists on Steam and the sales of the game in this store related?

App2Top.ru cites a squeeze from their research with Gamesindustry.biz .

YoYo Games are the authors of the GameMaker Studio 2 game engine. It was to the community of this software that they addressed such questions:

• What motivates players to add the game to the wishlist (aka vishlist)?
• How does the spike in hits of the game occur in the vishlist?
• Is it possible to predict the sales of the game thanks to vishlist?

How to get into the vishlist

Often people decide to add a game to their wish list only after visiting its Steam page. Therefore, you need to prepare the page even before the announcement of the game. It should contain full information about the project, as well as colorful trailers and screenshots. It is also necessary to specify the release date, even if it will have to be postponed in the future.

This also means that players need to be attracted to the Steam page. According to all respondents, the findability of the game increases the chance that sooner or later it will get into someone’s vishlist.

How to benefit from Vishlist

When the game is released, all players who have added it to the wish list receive an e-mail. This is the main benefit of the vishlist. Thanks to him, players are more likely not to miss the exit of the game and make a purchase.

It is equally important that the user also follows the developers’ Steam pages. Then he will receive notifications about new pages of the developer’s games on Steam.

Interesting fact: after the release, the game is being added to the wish lists more often. There are several reasons for this.

• Firstly, at launch, the game begins to flash in the media headlines and in the profiles of influencers, i.e. more people learn about it;
• secondly, Steam itself pays more attention to the newly launched titles, showing them in the ratings;
• thirdly, before the release of the game, its price is not always indicated, and this is an important factor for most users.

And again, the key aspect here is findability.

In addition, a surge in getting the game into the wish lists occurs during sales. People buy the game or remove it from the vishlist, but, one way or another, its visibility for other players increases.

But, as noted by Yo-Yo Games, the correlation between vishlist and total sales is not an absolute indicator and does not work for every game.

“Countless games that almost didn’t make the wish lists had terrible initial sales. Then, for some reason, a large influx of players appeared out of nowhere. Of course, you can find a connection between the wish lists and sales in the aggregate. But in the case of a particular game, the number of additions to the vishlist may not be a useful metric,” says Seth Coster from Butterscotch Shenanigans.

Also on the topic:

• Ubisoft: Steam business model is impossible in modern realitiesOfficially:
• Valve has taken control of the change of release dates on Steam