In the professional game development community, there's a theory suggesting that Steam wishlists have lost their former value. Game marketing expert Chris Zukowski explored this notion and shared his findings in the How To Market A Game blog.
- To begin, Zukowski described the essence of the problem in the article. According to the “inflation” theory of wishlists, Steam users are now adding games to their wishlists more frequently, but this hasn't led to a corresponding spike in purchases. Consequently, wishlist conversion to sales has worsened over recent years.
- The expert attempted to confirm or refute this hypothesis using data from 160 games. He categorized the projects into two groups: 1) those released during the emergence of Steam Next Fest and other festivals on Steam (2020-2022); 2) those released when Valve began more selectively choosing festivals for the Steam homepage (2023-2025). Zukowski excluded 2026 statistics from the analysis since the year hadn't ended yet.
- It turned out that “inflation” does indeed exist. Data showed that in the release month, the 2023-2025 games sold, on average, half as many copies per wishlist as the 2020-2022 games: 0.22 copies versus 0.45 copies. This gap persisted over a broader timeframe. For instance, by the end of their debut year, 2023-2025 games sold about 0.7 copies per wishlist, compared to 0.99 copies for 2020-2022 games.
- According to Zukowski, there could be several reasons for this “inflation.” One is that Valve has made adding games to wishlists easier. For example, gamers can now add games to wishlists without visiting the games' pages. Consequently, for many, wishlists have become akin to bookmarks, no longer reflecting genuine interest in the games.
- Another possible reason, notes the expert, is the hype surrounding Steam festivals. The number of participating games is rapidly increasing, and wishlists are growing accordingly. Additionally, developers today are generally more savvy about marketing than before, which results in more active adding of games to wishlists.
- Zukowski cautioned against hasty conclusions. According to him, “inflation” doesn't mean one can dismiss wishlists—they remain a reliable indicator of a game's commercial potential and can still be used to forecast sales. His calculations indicated that over recent years, the link between the number of wishlists and game sales has nearly retained its strength, despite a shift in the coefficient.
- Zukowski also suggested considering the velocity of additions to wishlists. This metric can be used to forecast game sales with nearly the same accuracy as the number of wishlists. Simultaneously accounting for both metrics slightly enhances the accuracy of predictions.
“It is hard to wrap your mind around it… but both things are true: wishlist counts have inflated (each wishlist sells fewer units), but wishlists predict sales just as well as they did 3 years ago. As an analogy to the real world… just because the cost of living is going up doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay rent,” Zukowski concluded.