How to get more Steam wishlists: what actually moves the number
You have a store page, or you are about to make one, and everybody gives you the same advice: get wishlists. Almost nobody explains why the number matters, how many is enough, or which of the dozen things you could spend this month on will actually move it. So you post more often, watch the counter creep, and have no idea whether any of it is working.
A wishlist is a small promise from a player who is interested but not buying today. The reason it matters is mechanical rather than sentimental: it is both a reminder that gets delivered to that person at the exact moment they can act on it, and a signal the store itself reads when it decides who to show your game to.
This article goes through the levers in the order they are worth pulling — when your page goes live, demos and festivals, going where the players already are, and the one most developers never touch, which is what language the page is written in.
What a wishlist actually does for you
There are two mechanisms, and they work differently. The first is direct: Steam notifies the people who wishlisted your game when it releases and when it goes on discount. That makes every wishlist a purchase reminder delivered at the only two moments when a reminder converts, without you having to run a mailing list or buy an ad.
The second is visibility. How many wishlists you have, and how fast you are accumulating them, feeds the store's own lists of upcoming games. Accumulating quickly puts you in front of players who were not searching for you and had no way to find you otherwise. This is the part that compounds: visibility produces wishlists, and wishlists produce visibility.
One caution, because it is where the metric misleads people. Wishlists are not sales, and the conversion rate between them varies enormously between games. A large number built from broad, low-intent traffic converts worse than a smaller number built from a community that specifically wants your kind of game. Treat the wishlist count as a rate to watch and a signal to interpret — not as a score to feel good about.
Publish the page early and let it accumulate
The single most common structural mistake is opening the store page a few weeks before release. Wishlists accumulate over time from every source you will ever use. A page that has existed for a year has been collecting from every post, every video, every event, and every conversation in that year. A page that has existed for three weeks has captured only the last three weeks of attention, and everything you did before it existed sent interested people nowhere.
A coming-soon page does not require a finished game. It requires enough presentable material to pass store review — a capsule, screenshots, a description, usually a trailer. If your game is far enough along that you can show it honestly, the page should probably already exist.
Once it does, apply link discipline. Every devlog, every clip, every post, every video description, and every festival entry points at that page. This sounds obvious and is broken constantly: developers build months of attention on social platforms with no destination attached to it.
Expect some erosion. Wishlists get deleted, and people lose interest over long development cycles. The response to that is not to delay the page but to keep feeding it, because the deletions come out of a pool that is still growing.
Demos and festivals are the highest-yield events you get
A demo converts attention into a wishlist better than a trailer does, because the player has already invested time and formed an opinion. Somebody who played fifteen minutes and wanted more is a fundamentally different prospect from somebody who watched a thirty-second clip.
Festivals concentrate something that is otherwise very hard to find: players who are actively browsing for new games they have never heard of. Steam Next Fest and themed festival events put your demo in front of exactly that audience, in a window where they expect to try unfinished things and are forgiving about it.
The practical constraint is that this traffic is essentially one-shot per game. Entering a major festival with a build that crashes, or with a demo that opens on a slow tutorial, spends the opportunity without getting the wishlists. If the build is not ready, the right move is usually the next event rather than this one.
For the demo itself: pick the shortest slice that is genuinely satisfying, end it at a moment where the player wants the next thing rather than at an arbitrary cut, and make sure the ending screen actually points at the store page. A demo that finishes with nothing but a thank-you leaves the conversion on the table.
Go where the players already are
The store rewards games that are already moving, which is a problem when nothing is moving yet. The initial mass has to come from outside, and there are only a few routes that reliably work for small teams.
Creators and streamers are the highest-leverage one, because a single video reaches people the store would never have shown you to. Make it easy for them: a build that runs without instructions, a short press kit with clips and stills, a clear contact address, and keys that arrive quickly. Target people who already cover your genre rather than the largest channels you can find.
Genre communities — forums, Discord servers, subreddits, local dev groups — work on a longer timescale and reward participation rather than promotion. The developers who do well in these spaces are visible in them for months before they have anything to sell.
Short gameplay video is the cheapest repeatable format there is, and it compounds. A clip that shows one clear mechanic in a few seconds can be produced from work you already did that week, and posting consistently matters more than any individual post performing well.
Every one of these routes ends with somebody clicking a link, which is why the page has to exist before the campaign, not after it.
Wishlists from other countries move when the page becomes readable
Everything above assumes the person who lands on your page can read it. For a large share of the people browsing any major store, that assumption is simply false, and it is the lever almost nobody pulls because it does not look like marketing.
Steam shows a player the store description in their own language when one has been provided, and your original language when it has not. Importantly, that description is supplied per language independently of which languages the game itself supports — which means a page can be readable in a language before the game is, and you can find out whether that market cares before committing to translating the whole thing.
The word count involved is small. A description, a set of feature bullets, and a short tagline is the smallest unit of translation work that exists in this industry, and it is the one with the most visibility per word. That is also why quality matters here more than anywhere else: a page that reads as if it went through a machine and was pasted in unread tells a browsing player something about the care that went into the rest of the game, and the conclusion is not usually generous.
The reason to do this specifically for wishlists is that the result is measurable. Steamworks reports wishlist activity by country and region, so you can look at the balance before you translate and again a month after, against the same marketing activity. If a region that was producing traffic but almost no wishlists starts producing wishlists, you have found a real answer to a question most developers only guess at.
Reading the number and picking your next move
Watch the rate, not the total. The useful view is wishlists per day over time, with the spikes labelled — this video, that festival, this post. Two months of flat accumulation punctuated by three spikes tells you exactly which three things worked and deserve to be repeated.
Look at the composition as well as the volume. Steamworks separates additions from deletions and from activations (a wishlist converting to a purchase). Steady additions with heavy deletions usually means you are attracting people who are not quite your audience — often a positioning or tag problem rather than a marketing volume problem.
Then look at where they come from geographically, and compare that with where your page traffic comes from. A region that visits heavily and wishlists rarely is telling you something specific: they found you and did not act. Sometimes that is genre fit. Often it is that they could not read the page.
Before launch, the question worth asking is not 'do I have enough' — nobody can answer that for your game, and thresholds quoted online come from games that are not yours. The question is whether the number is still growing, and whether you can name the reason it grew last month. If you can, you know what to do next month. If you cannot, that is the real problem to solve, and it is a more useful thing to work on than the counter itself.