How Steam Wishlists Work

How Steam's Wishlist System Actually Works (Technical Deep Dive)

TL;DR: Steam sends wishlist emails on four triggers: launch, EA-to-full-release, 20%+ discounts, and demo release. There's a two-week cooldown between emails. Only 60-75% of your wishlist actually receives notifications (email verification + preferences). The Popular Upcoming threshold is roughly 7,000 wishlists accumulated within a compressed timeframe.

Key Takeaways

• Four email triggers: product launch, EA-to-1.0 transition, 20%+ discounts (8+ hours, affects lowest-priced package), and demo release (manually triggered)
• Two-week cooldown between emails per user, extending to 3-4 weeks during major sales
• Only 60-75% of wishlisters actually receive notifications due to email verification and preference settings
• Wishlists don't directly feed the recommendation algorithm, but velocity signals external validation that triggers algorithmic favor
• The demo notification requires manual activation on your demo's Steamworks landing page within two weeks of release

Most developers know that wishlists matter. Fewer understand the actual machinery behind them. Time to look under the hood. The wishlist system is more than a "remind me later" button. It's an email marketing platform, a visibility signal, and a behavioral dataset, all rolled into one.

This guide is the technical companion to our complete wishlist-building strategy guide. Where that article covers the "what to do," this one covers the "how it works under the hood." If you're making decisions about launch timing, discount strategy, or demo releases, you need to understand these mechanics.

What Happens When Someone Clicks "Add to Wishlist"

When a logged-in Steam user clicks the wishlist button on your store page, several things happen simultaneously. The user's account stores a reference to your AppID with a timestamp. Your Steamworks dashboard increments the wishlist count (data lags by roughly one day). The user's Discovery Queue and recommendation feeds register this as a signal of interest in your game's tags. And your game becomes eligible to appear in the "Popular Upcoming" section if accumulation velocity is high enough.

From the user's side, they can sort and filter their own wishlist. That organizational data isn't exposed to you. You see a number going up or down.

The Four Email Notification Triggers

This is the core of the system. Steam sends email (and mobile push) notifications to wishlisters under exactly four conditions. Each has specific rules.

1. Product Launch (Release or Early Access)

When you press the release button, Steam fires off emails and push notifications to every wishlister with a verified email and enabled notification preferences. This is automatic. You don't press a separate button. The moment your game transitions from "Coming Soon" to "Available," the emails start going out.

If you launch into Early Access first, that counts as your launch notification. When you later transition from Early Access to Full Release, a second round of emails goes out. This is effectively a second launch. Developers sometimes underestimate how valuable this is. It's another free email blast to your entire wishlist, potentially months or years after the first one.

2. Promotional Discounts (20% or Greater)

Any discount of 20% or more triggers a wishlist notification email. The type of discount doesn't matter. Weeklong deals, seasonal sale participation, Daily Deals, custom configured discounts, they all qualify as long as they hit the 20% threshold.

There are three additional requirements that trip people up:

• The discount must affect your lowest-priced package. If you have a Standard Edition at $20 and a Deluxe at $30, discounting only the Deluxe won't trigger emails. You need to discount the Standard too.
• The discount must run for at least 8 hours.
• If the email gets stuck in the queue for over a week (rare, but possible during massive sale events), Steam stops trying to send it.

This is your long-tail conversion engine. Every time you discount at 20% or more, you're re-engaging a chunk of your wishlist. This is why the "discount staircase" strategy exists: progressively deeper discounts over time, each one pulling in a new slice of buyers who were waiting for the right price.

3. Demo Release

You can send one notification to wishlisters when you make an associated free demo publicly available. Unlike the other triggers, this one is under your manual control. After your demo goes live, you'll see a button on your demo's app landing page in Steamworks. You have up to two weeks after the demo release to push that button.

Timing matters here. If you're participating in Steam Next Fest, you might want to time your demo notification to coincide with the festival start for maximum impact. Or you might want to send it a week before to build momentum going in. LORT's team pushed the email button immediately at their demo launch two weeks before Next Fest, and later wondered if saving it for Day 1 of the festival would have been smarter. There's no clear consensus.

4. Early Access to Full Release Transition

This deserves its own section because developers often forget about it during planning. The EA-to-1.0 transition fires a second full notification blast. If you've been in Early Access for a year and accumulated additional wishlists during that period, those people get notified too. It's a genuine second launch window.

Games like Hades and Satisfactory have demonstrated how powerful this transition can be. The notification goes to your entire current wishlist, not just people who wishlisted before EA launch.

The Two-Week Cooldown

Steam enforces a cooldown of approximately two weeks between emails about the same AppID. If a user received a notification about your game on January 1st, they won't receive another one until roughly January 15th, regardless of how many qualifying events happen in between.

During high-traffic periods like the Steam Summer Sale or Winter Sale, this cooldown can extend further. Valve hasn't published exact numbers for extended cooldowns, but developers have reported gaps of three to four weeks during major sales.

The practical implication: don't stack notification-triggering events within two weeks of each other. What developers who've tested this extensively report is that the cooldown window is more like three weeks in practice during high-traffic periods, so building extra buffer into your planning is wise. If your game launches on June 1st, don't plan a 25% discount for June 10th. Those emails will get swallowed by the cooldown. Space your events at least three weeks apart, and during sale seasons, give yourself a full month of buffer.

Who Actually Receives These Emails

Not every wishlister gets every email. Two filters reduce your effective reach:

Email verification. Users must have a verified email address linked to their Steam account. Most active users do, but some percentage of wishlists come from accounts with unverified emails. These people will never receive your notifications.

Customer email preferences. Users can configure which types of emails they receive by going to Account Details and selecting "Manage Email Preferences." Some users turn off wishlist notifications entirely. Others disable specific categories. You have no visibility into what percentage of your wishlist has opted out.

Valve doesn't share exact deliverability numbers publicly. Based on developer reports across the HTMAG Discord and various GDC talks, the effective reach is roughly 60 to 75% of your total wishlist count. That means if you have 10,000 wishlisters, somewhere between 6,000 and 7,500 will actually receive the email. Plan your revenue projections accordingly.

Your Wishlist Data in Steamworks

Steamworks gives you several ways to slice your wishlist data. Knowing where to find it (and what it means) saves you from building elaborate tracking spreadsheets that duplicate data you already have.

The Wishlist Dashboard

Navigate to your app's detail page on the Sales & Activation Reports Portal. The "Wishlists" section tracks three metrics daily:

• Additions: New wishlists per day.
• Purchases: Wishlisters who bought your game (which automatically removes it from their list).
• Deletions: Wishlisters who manually removed your game without buying.

Data updates daily for the previous date. If it's March 2nd, you can see data through March 1st.

Regional Data

The "Regional Sales Report" section breaks down wishlist numbers by country and region. This data is gold for localization decisions. If 15% of your wishlists come from Germany and your game has no German translation, that's a concrete business case for localization. Steam is more likely to show your game to users who speak languages your game supports, so adding a translation can unlock visibility in that region.

Email Campaign Tracking

After any wishlist notification goes out, you can track its performance in two places:

• Traffic Breakdown (under Marketing & Visibility): Shows visits to your store page that originated from wishlist emails.
• Wishlist Breakdown (on the financial reporting site, scroll to the bottom): Shows emails sent during a selected time period and their conversion rates.

This lets you compare the effectiveness of different notification events. Did your launch email convert better than your first sale email? Did the demo notification drive more traffic than the Winter Sale discount? The data is there.

Free Tool: Revenue Calculator — Estimate your revenue at different price points and discount levels. Runs in your browser, no signup required.

Conversion Benchmarks

Simon Carless at Game Discover Co has compiled the most extensive wishlist conversion data from developer surveys. Here's what the numbers show for first-week sales as a percentage of total wishlists at launch:

Higher wishlist counts correlate with higher conversion rates. This makes sense: games that accumulate large wishlists tend to have stronger market fit, better Steam pages, and more external buzz, all of which contribute to launch-day urgency. See our guide on how many wishlists you need to launch for specific benchmarks.

Normal wishlist deletion rates hover around 9 to 12% annually. In practice, developers who monitor their deletion rates report that spikes around launch are normal and don't indicate a problem—people who decide not to buy after seeing reviews will remove the game, and that's expected behavior. Deletions spike slightly around major sale events (people clean up their lists) and around your launch (people who decide against buying). Don't panic about deletions unless you're seeing rates above 15%, which might indicate a problem with your game's positioning or a misleading store page. For the distinction between wishlists and Steam followers (and when each matters more), see Steam Followers vs. Wishlists Explained.

How Wishlists Affect Visibility

Valve's official documentation states that "with a few exceptions like the Popular Upcoming tab, wishlists are not a factor in your game's algorithmic visibility on Steam." This is technically accurate and practically misleading.

Wishlists don't directly feed into the recommendation algorithm the way purchases and playtime do. But they serve as a proxy for external validation. A game accumulating 500 wishlists per day signals to the system (and to Valve's human curators) that something interesting is happening. That velocity can land you on the Popular Upcoming list, which is one of the few pre-launch visibility slots on the entire Steam store.

The rough threshold for Popular Upcoming is around 7,000 wishlists accumulated within a compressed timeframe. Chris Zukowski identified this number through years of tracking which games appear on the list and at what wishlist levels. It's not a hard cutoff. Games with lower totals but extremely high velocity sometimes appear, while games that accumulated 7,000 over two years without a spike sometimes don't.

The visibility feedback loop works like this: external marketing drives wishlist velocity, velocity gets you onto Popular Upcoming, Popular Upcoming drives more organic wishlists from Steam's own traffic, and those additional wishlists further increase your velocity. Getting coverage from press and content creators is one of the most reliable ways to trigger this cycle.

What Changed in 2025 and 2026

Steam's wishlist system has seen several notable shifts:

Steam Next Fest algorithm updates. In Fall 2024 and February 2025, Valve adjusted the Next Fest algorithm to give more equal visibility to smaller titles during the first two days. By Day 3, the algorithm sorts based on performance. Zukowski's survey of 208 developers after February 2025 confirmed that bronze-tier games got significantly more Day 1 impressions than in previous festivals, but diamond-tier games still dominated by Day 3.

Mobile push notifications grew more prominent. Steam's mobile app has gotten more aggressive about push notifications for wishlisted games, adding a second channel beyond email.

The 2025 "golden age" data. Of the 20,282 games released on Steam in 2025, 608 hit 1,000 reviews, a 2.99% success rate, the highest since Zukowski started tracking in 2022.

Demo notification timing. More developers are timing demo notifications strategically. Rather than sending them immediately, teams like Cairn's Game Bakers timed their notification to coincide with festival appearances for maximum impact.

Common Mistakes

Stacking discount events too close together. The cooldown eats your second event's emails like a Pac-Man on a power pellet. Space them at least three weeks apart.

Ignoring regional data. If 20% of your wishlists come from a country where your game isn't localized, you're leaving money on the table.

Expecting high conversion from old wishlists. A wishlist from two years ago converts at a much lower rate than one from last month.

Not using the demo notification button. The demo notification requires manual activation. Check your demo's app landing page.

Launching during a seasonal sale. Extended cooldowns during major sales mean your launch email competes with dozens of other notifications, reducing impact.

Building Your Strategy Around the System

Your demo notification, launch email, first discount, and EA-to-1.0 transition are four distinct notification events. Space them strategically. Time them around festivals and content creator pushes for compounding effect. Your job is to give the system something worth notifying people about.

For the broader strategy on how to actually accumulate those wishlists, head back to the main wishlist-building guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my discount not sending wishlist emails?

Three common causes: the discount doesn't affect your lowest-priced package, the discount is under 20%, or it runs less than 8 hours. Also check if you're within the two-week cooldown from a previous notification.

Should I time my demo notification to coincide with Next Fest?

It depends. Some developers push the button immediately at demo launch to build momentum before the fest. Others save it for Day 1 of Next Fest for maximum impact during the event. There's no clear consensus, but in practice I've found that having pre-fest wishlists before the algorithm sorts winners and losers helps more than saving the notification.

Do old wishlists still convert at the same rate?

Older wishlists convert at lower rates than recent ones. Someone who wishlisted two years ago may have forgotten about your game or lost interest. This is why front-loading your biggest marketing pushes close to launch matters.

How can I see which wishlists came from where?

Steamworks provides regional data and traffic source data. Check the "Wishlists" section on your app's Sales & Activation Reports for daily additions/deletions, and the "Traffic Breakdown" under Marketing & Visibility for source attribution.

Related Guides

This article is part of our series on steam wishlists. Start with the complete guide:

• Building Steam wishlists

Also in this series:

• How many wishlists you need to launch
• Using your press kit to drive wishlists
• Reddit marketing for indie games

Last updated: February 2026. Primary sources: Steamworks Documentation (partner.steamgames.com), howtomarketagame.com (Chris Zukowski), Game Discover Co (Simon Carless).