How Many Wishlists Do You Need to Launch on Steam?
Wishlists are the closest thing to a pre-order count that Steam gives you. They don't promise sales, but they're the best signal you have before launch — and they're the number publishers ask about first.
From wishlists to launch-week sales
When your game launches (and whenever it's discounted), Steam emails everyone who wishlisted it. A share of them buy in the first week. Developers who publish their numbers commonly report first-week sales of roughly 5% to 20% of wishlists, depending on genre, price, reviews and timing.
So 10,000 wishlists at launch usually mean somewhere between 500 and 2,000 copies in the first week. The Steam sales estimator shows conservative, typical and strong scenarios side by side, and every percentage is editable.
Working backwards to a target
- Decide what the first week needs to bring in — for example, enough to cover the last six months of development.
- Turn that into copies with the Steam revenue calculator, which takes off discounts, VAT, refunds and Steam's cut.
- Divide by a conservative conversion rate. If you need 1,000 copies and assume 7%, you want about 14,000 wishlists before launch.
If the conservative case doesn't work, that's a reason to keep building wishlists (festivals, demos, trailers, streamers) before setting a date, not to hope for the strong case.
Estimating sales of any game from reviews
For games already out — yours or competitors' — the "Boxleiter method" multiplies the number of Steam reviews by a factor, commonly between 20 and 60 copies per review. Cheap games and games with casual audiences sit at the high end because fewer buyers leave reviews. It's a rough rule, but it's useful to size a niche: if the ten closest competitors have a few hundred reviews each, a multi-million-dollar outcome is unlikely.
Common mistakes
- Treating wishlists as sales. Many people wishlist and forget.
- Comparing your total to games in a different genre or price range.
- Forgetting that wishlists keep converting during later sales — the first week is only the beginning.