How Many Wishlists Do You Need to Launch Successfully?
TL;DR: There's no magic number, but benchmarks exist. Gold tier revenue ($250K+) typically requires 30,000-50,000 wishlists at launch. The 7,000 wishlist threshold gets you on Popular Upcoming and is the Gold tier cutoff for Next Fest. Genre matters enormously: Open World Survival Craft has a 20.8% hit rate while 2D Platformers have 0.18%.
Key Takeaways
- Bronze tier ($0-10K): algorithm ignores you. Silver ($10K-$249K): possibly profitable solo. Gold ($250K-$999K): Valve actively promotes you. Diamond ($1M+): life-changing
- 1,000 reviews typically correlates with $150K+ gross revenue, making it the key benchmark
- Work backward from your financial needs: if you need $228K gross with 20% conversion at $20/game, you need ~20,000 wishlists
- Genre affects everything: survival craft games convert 100x better than puzzle platformers on Steam
- Desktop Defender proved the exception (200 to 20,000 wishlists in Next Fest), but you can't plan your business around being the outlier
The honest answer is "it depends," and anyone giving you a single number is either selling a course or doesn't understand the data. The meaning of life might be 42, but the meaning of wishlists is more nuanced. But "it depends" isn't useful by itself. You need specifics. You need ranges. You need to understand what those ranges mean for your particular game, genre, and financial situation.
This article builds on our complete guide to building Steam wishlists with focused analysis on the numbers question. How many wishlists separate a game that pays rent from a game that doesn't? What benchmarks should you target? And when should you stop chasing a number and just ship?
The Revenue Tiers That Actually Matter
Chris Zukowski at howtomarketagame.com has spent years categorizing Steam game outcomes into four tiers based on gross lifetime revenue. These tiers aren't arbitrary. Each one represents a qualitative shift in how Steam treats your game and how sustainable your business becomes.
Bronze ($0 to $10K): Your game exists, and that's about it. Typically fewer than 10 reviews. The Steam algorithm functionally ignores you. You won't get Daily Deal offers. You won't appear in recommendation carousels. Most of the 20,282 games released on Steam in 2025 ended up here.
Silver ($10K to $249K): Possibly profitable if you're solo and kept scope tight. Reviews usually plateau around 100 to 200. The algorithm gives you some organic traffic, but not much. You can make a living here if you ship multiple silver-tier games, but each individual game won't change your life.
Gold ($250K to $999K): This is what Zukowski calls "Real Steam." Valve starts actively promoting your game. You get Daily Deal offers. The algorithm works for you instead of against you. You probably hit 500 to 1,000+ reviews. This is where sustainable indie careers begin.
Diamond ($1M+): Life-changing. Valve sends you a box of expensive chocolates at Christmas (this is real, the threshold is roughly $900K to $1M gross). The chocolates cost Valve about 0.08% of their 30% cut. Achievement unlocked, we suppose.
The critical inflection point: games that reach approximately 1,000 reviews almost always correlate with $150,000 or more in gross revenue. This isn't a perfect formula, but it's the most reliable proxy available. Zukowski uses 1,000 reviews as his annual benchmark when analyzing which games "made it" each year.
Free Tool: Wishlist Calculator — Calculate how many wishlists you need to hit your launch goals. Runs in your browser, no signup required.
Working Backward From Revenue Targets
If you know your target revenue, you can reverse-engineer a rough wishlist target. The math isn't complicated, but it requires honest inputs.
Step 1: Define your financial need. How much gross revenue do you need to break even? Include living expenses, contractor costs, software, marketing, and post-launch support. Two years of development at $80,000/year means you need roughly $228,000 gross (accounting for Steam's 30% cut).
Step 2: Estimate your first-week conversion rate. Based on Simon Carless's survey data at Game Discover Co, and what developers who track these numbers consistently report:
| Wishlists at Launch | Median First-Week Conversion |
|---|---|
| Under 5,000 | ~15% |
| 5,000 to 39,999 | ~20% |
| 40,000 to 99,999 | ~23% |
| 100,000+ | ~25% |
Step 3: Estimate first-week revenue as a fraction of lifetime. A typical indie game makes roughly 25 to 40% of lifetime revenue in the first month. Long-tail hits (Stardew Valley, Vampire Survivors) make less up front. Spike-and-fade games make most of their money immediately.
Step 4: Run the numbers. Say you need $228,000 gross lifetime and expect first-month revenue at about 35% of lifetime. That's $80,000 in month one. At $20 per copy, that's 4,000 sales. If your conversion rate is 20%, you need 4,000 / 0.20 = 20,000 wishlists at launch.
That's a rough estimate, and reality will vary. But now you have a number to aim at instead of guessing.
Benchmarks by Genre
Genre changes the equation significantly. Steam's audience is not equally hungry for every type of game. Zukowski's 2025 genre analysis showed massive differences in hit rates:
| Genre | Games with 1,000+ Reviews | Total Released | Hit Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open World Survival Craft | 15 | 72 | 20.8% |
| Farming | 5 | 60 | 8.3% |
| Roguelike Deckbuilder | 11 | 212 | 5.1% |
| Management | 19 | 549 | 3.4% |
| Simulation | 43 | 1,048 | 4.1% |
| Idle/Incremental | 27 | 965 | 2.8% |
| Horror | 39 | 1,208 | 3.2% |
| RPG | 28 | 1,158 | 2.4% |
| Puzzle | 14 | 4,022 | 0.34% |
| 2D Platformer | 3 | 1,658 | 0.18% |
What this means for wishlist targets: a management sim with 15,000 wishlists at launch is in a much stronger position than a 2D platformer with the same count. The management sim is swimming with the current. The platformer is fighting against it.
Zukowski's data consistently shows that "crafty-buildy-strategy-simulation" games, horror, and idle/incremental games convert well because Steam's audience actively seeks them out. If your game is in one of these hot genres, you might succeed with fewer wishlists than the averages suggest. If you're making a puzzle platformer, you probably need more.
The 7,000 Wishlist Benchmark
This number keeps appearing in Zukowski's research for a reason. Roughly 7,000 wishlists, accumulated within a compressed timeframe, is the threshold where your game starts appearing on Steam's Popular Upcoming list. Getting on that list triggers a visibility cascade: more eyeballs, more wishlists, more algorithmic favor.
It's also the Gold tier cutoff for wishlists earned during a single Steam Next Fest. Games that earned 7,000 or more during Next Fest were categorized as Gold tier performers in Zukowski's surveys.
But 7,000 is a floor. Many games launch with 7,000 wishlists and still land in the Silver revenue tier. The conversion rate depends on your Steam page quality, your genre, your price point, and that intangible thing Zukowski calls "the magic," the quality that makes the Steam algorithm fall in love with your game.
If you're targeting Gold tier revenue ($250K+), plan for 30,000 to 50,000 wishlists at launch. Diamond territory ($1M+) typically requires 100,000 or more.
Desktop Defender: When Quality Overrides Numbers
Every rule has exceptions, and Desktop Defender is the one everyone points to.
The solo developer, Conradical, entered the October 2025 Steam Next Fest with approximately 200 followers. Not 200,000. Two hundred. The game's demo launched hours before the festival started. By Day 3, it was on the Top Demo chart. It earned 20,000 wishlists during the festival.
This seems to disprove everything. Why bother with months of pre-launch marketing if a game can go from 200 to 20,000 in a week? In reality, the developers who've analyzed these outlier cases consistently find that the game had "something" that resonated instantly—you can't manufacture that, but you can set up conditions that let it happen.
Zukowski himself addressed this directly in his analysis: "This exception to the rule does not mean everyone should go into Steam Next Fest with 0 wishlists and launch their demo seconds before the start." Desktop Defender succeeded because the game had what he calls "the magic." It was an idle auto-battler that sits in the corner of your screen while you do other things. The concept was instantly appealing. The genre (idle/incremental) is white-hot on Steam. And Conradical wasn't a newcomer. He's released over 9 games across various platforms.
If Desktop Defender had launched its demo a week earlier, Zukowski estimates it would have started Next Fest at even higher CCU and potentially earned more wishlists. The game succeeded despite the unconventional approach, not because of it.
The lesson isn't "numbers don't matter." The lesson is that a genuinely compelling game in a hungry genre can occasionally leap past the benchmarks. But you can't plan your business around being the exception. Plan for the median. Be pleasantly surprised if you're the outlier.
When to Delay vs. Ship
This is the question that keeps developers up at night. Your wishlists are lower than you'd like. Do you delay and keep marketing, or do you ship and learn from the experience?
Arguments for delaying:
- You haven't done your last Steam Next Fest yet. If you're sitting at 5,000 wishlists and haven't participated in a Next Fest, delaying to participate could add 2,000 to 7,000+ wishlists.
- Your Steam page has obvious problems. If your capsule art looks amateur or your trailer doesn't show gameplay in the first five seconds, fixing these before launch is more valuable than any amount of social media grinding.
- You have a concrete marketing plan that hasn't been executed yet. Pending content creator campaigns, festival appearances, or a trailer recut are tangible reasons to wait.
Arguments for shipping:
- Your wishlists have flatlined for months and you have no new marketing tactics to try. Delaying without a plan is just procrastination with extra anxiety.
- You've been in development for over three years on a small game. Scope creep and "just one more feature" syndrome kill more indie careers than low wishlists.
- Your financial runway is running out. Shipping a Silver-tier game that makes $30,000 is better than running out of savings while chasing Gold tier.
- You're making a game in a competitive genre where the window is closing. The friend-slop genre that's white-hot in 2025 might be saturated by the time you've spent six more months polishing.
Zukowski's advice, distilled from years of data: "Focus on the game. Make it a good game that people go crazy for." If your wishlists are low because the market isn't responding to your game concept, no amount of additional marketing will fix that. Ship it, learn from the data, and make the next one better.
His broader philosophy is that indie devs should be making smaller, faster games. Release 10 smaller projects in 5 years instead of 1 dream game. Conradical, the Desktop Defender developer, embodies this: 6 games in 12 months, mixing larger projects with smaller ones.
The "Missing Middle" Problem
There's a pattern Zukowski has identified that's worth understanding. Many games get stuck in what he calls the "missing middle." They accumulate 5,000 to 15,000 wishlists, launch to decent first-week sales, settle around 100 to 200 reviews, and then stall. Not a failure, but not "Real Steam" either.
These games typically earn $30,000 to $100,000 gross lifetime. If you spent six months solo, that's a livable outcome. If you spent three years with a team of four, it's a financial disaster.
The missing middle is where most games land. The games that push past it into Gold and Diamond territory almost always have one thing in common: something happened that made the Steam algorithm take notice. A viral TikTok. A content creator with 500K subscribers falling in love with the game. A festival appearance that triggered a wishlist velocity spike. Or just "the magic," the ineffable quality that makes players tell their friends.
You can set up the conditions for this. Great trailers and screenshots, professional press kits, content creator outreach, festival participation. But whether the spark catches depends on the game itself.
Practical Benchmarks by Situation
Solo dev, first game, niche genre: If you hit 5,000 wishlists at launch, consider that a solid result. Your primary goal is learning the full cycle from announcement through post-launch support.
Solo dev, experienced, hot genre: Target 15,000 to 30,000. You know the marketing playbook. Execute it. The genre tailwind should help.
Small team (2-4 people), moderate budget: Target 30,000 to 50,000. You have salary and contractor costs to recoup. Anything below 20,000 should trigger a serious conversation about whether to delay or restructure.
Team with publisher or external funding: Your publisher likely has their own benchmarks. If they don't, push them on it. You need clear, data-driven milestones, not vibes.
The Honest Bottom Line
There is no safe number. 50,000 wishlists doesn't guarantee success if your game has technical problems at launch or your conversion rate is below average. 5,000 wishlists doesn't guarantee failure if your game has "the magic" and your genre's audience is starving for content.
What the data shows, across hundreds of games tracked by Zukowski and Carless, is a probability curve. More wishlists mean better odds. But wishlists are a lagging indicator of something more fundamental: whether your game resonates with an audience that's willing to pay for it.
Use the benchmarks as planning tools, not as pass/fail gates. Work backward from your financial needs. Pick a genre where the odds are at least somewhat in your favor. And if the market is telling you something through low wishlist accumulation, listen to it. That signal is worth more than any benchmark.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 7,000 wishlists really enough to launch?
It's the floor, not the ceiling. 7,000 gets you on Popular Upcoming and signals basic market validation. But many games launch with 7,000 and still land in Silver tier. For Gold tier results, you're looking at 30,000-50,000 wishlists at launch.
Should I delay if my wishlists are below target?
Delay if you have concrete marketing tactics left to execute (Next Fest, pending creator campaigns, trailer recut). Don't delay if wishlists have flatlined and you have no new plan. Delaying without a strategy is just procrastination with extra anxiety.
What if my game is great but wishlists are low?
Low wishlists despite good gameplay usually points to a visibility or store page problem. Your capsule art, tags, or screenshots may not communicate what makes your game special. I've tested this across multiple launches: sometimes a capsule redesign transforms performance more than any marketing campaign.
Can a first-time developer realistically hit Gold tier?
It's rare but possible. The developers who do it typically pick a hungry genre, execute every marketing beat well, and often get lucky with a viral moment or creator coverage. For most first games, Silver tier is a solid result. The real goal is learning the full cycle.
Related Guides
This article is part of our series on steam wishlists. Start with the complete guide:
Also in this series:
- How Steam wishlists actually work
- Using your press kit to drive wishlists
- Reddit marketing for indie games
Last updated: February 2026. Data sources: howtomarketagame.com (Chris Zukowski), Game Discover Co (Simon Carless), VGInsights.