Steam Wishlists By the Numbers: What Actually Gets Wishlisted

Talking to studios every week, we often see promising projects when they are still just a concept or a first trailer. But to understand what players actually want, we turn to public data, and no signal is sharper than Steam's top-100 wishlist chart: it shows where player tastes are heading and how winning titles announce and promote themselves. 

We recently completed a full pass over it. Below are the findings we found most interesting. 

The first thing that jumps out is who's actually on this list. Split the top 100 into two camps: independent games built on new IP with no franchise behind them, which we'll call indie for simplicity, and games from large studios, corporate subsidiaries, or established franchises, which we'll call AAA.  

Top-100 Steam Wishlist Composition 

The two camps divide the chart in half: 50 games each. The typical indie carries almost as many wishlists as the typical corporate title: an average of roughly 910k against 955k. So this is not a fringe of small games sheltering under a few giants.

A compelling indie, then, is fully competitive. If it offers an unusual look, gripping gameplay or a genuinely new idea, players respond with the same intent they give billion-dollar franchises. The rest of this piece focuses on those indies: how exactly they got there. 

Demand Takes Time

Start with a quirk: a wishlist total has no timestamp. Two games can post the same number while one earned it last year and the other has been collecting slowly since 2020. The list is full of both. 

Top-100 Indies by Announcement Year 

Most of the "current" demand on this chart is, in fact, old demand. 31 of the 50 indies were announced before 2025, and together they hold roughly 70% of all indie wishlists on the list. And among the games still on the chart, older cohorts carry larger totals: titles revealed before 2022 average roughly 1.2M wishlists, about 70% more than the 0.7M typical of the 2025-2026 cohorts. 

The reason is simple: time works for the game. Years usually pass between announcement and release, and studios spend that entire runway on promotion: a long series of beats, a slow build of community, a steadily warming audience. Every extra month on the chart is another month of accumulation, another chance to land a big moment, and more room to adjust the game while player feedback is still cheap to act on. Part of the pattern is also survivorship: the older titles still on the chart are, by definition, the ones that kept their demand. 

Announcement Momentum

Wishlists don't flow evenly. They arrive in waves, and behind nearly every wave there is a specific beat. To see which beats actually move the needle, , we quantified 112 major demand events across the 50 titles. The most powerful type is the announcement: an average reveal brings in 220k wishlists over its first 30 days, while the average non-announcement beat generates about 140k.

Announcement performance among top-100 indies 

Not every announcement lands, though. Just over half of the indie titles in the sample broke out right at announcement, and the gap between outcomes is stark: a strong reveal brings roughly four times more wishlists than a weak one, though both are nominally the same kind of event. That alone makes the reveal worth launch-level preparation: the venue, the week, gameplay in the first seconds. 

And the reveal keeps paying long after the first month. Long after the reveal, the median title still carries about a quarter of its wishlists from that first 30-day window. The rest comes from everything the announcement sets in motion: smaller beats, organic discovery, the long tail of that first impression. A reveal is not just an event, it is the starting point the rest of the campaign builds on. 

That said, a failed announcement is not a verdict. Several games in our sample reached the top through a series of later beats after a modest initial reveal.  

The Breakout Moment

The announcement is the biggest single beat, but it's not the only one that moves a game. Reveals, demos, gameplay trailers, and release-date drops all show up in the data. So where do these breakouts actually happen? We tracked how each venue performed across the largest demand events in our sample. 

The Most-Used Promotion Channels 

Two lessons jump out of this table. The first: a big stage raises your odds but doesn't guarantee reach. The Game Awards is in a class of its own at 418k per appearance, with Summer Game Fest next. But below that top tier the picture flattens fast.  

A YouTube-led reveal, the most-used route by far at 31 appearances, averages 175k, matching the Xbox Games Showcase, Sony's State of Play, and most mid-size events. Half the showcases here deliver less per slot than a plain YouTube upload would. Below the very top tier, the strength of the game and its trailer seems to matter at least as much as the venue. The clearest proof is reach itself: across the 36 announcements where we could match 30-day video views with 30-day wishlist growth, the two moved almost in lockstep, with a correlation of 0.83. The stage sets the ceiling; the reach of the reveal decides the spike. 

The second: the best-value venue on the chart is Steam Next Fest. Taking part costs nothing in media spend (a good demo is real work, but the slot itself is free), it's heavily used (10 appearances here), and it performs at 190k on average, above a plain YouTube upload. Letting players actually try the game reaches a warmer, higher-intent audience than another trailer alone, and it can revive a project that missed on its first reveal. 

Deeper Analysis on the Most-Wishlisted Games

If presentation decides whether reach converts, the game underneath still has to land. So what kind of game earns a place on this chart?  

By genre, action RPGs and survival-adventures top the chart at nine games each, with simulations right behind at eight. Survival-adventures account for the largest share of total wishlists at 23%, and together with FPS they also carry the highest per-game averages, at roughly 1.1-1.2M. The quiet surprise is simulation. Eight games about repairing electronics, operating giant turrets or running a planetary artillery bunker now sit shoulder to shoulder with the chart's biggest genres in headcount; the offbeat job sim has become an established demand lane, not a curiosity. 

Genre Breakdown 

By setting, players vote for escapism. Fantasy and sci-fi together account for 22 of the 50 titles, about 44%, and games set in an unmodified contemporary real world number just 5. Even the simulators mostly wrap their mundane work in fiction. 

Setting Breakdown 

Dark games, horror, dark fantasy, post-apocalypse, are the most popular mood on the chart: 25 of the 50 titles, and 19 of them pair the grim tone with realistic graphics. The demand there is broad and proven. But there is a clear audience for other moods too, and it responds even more eagerly. Light games are less common, yet they average the highest totals on the chart: roughly 1.05M against 884k for the dark cohort, with neutral titles at 820k, though a few very large light-hearted hits do much of that lifting. One likely reason is less direct competition for those players, though genre mix and selection effects may also play a part. 

Mood Breakdown 

One more cut worth naming: visual treatment. The chart splits almost evenly, 26 realistic games against 24 stylized ones, with stylized titles holding 45% of all indie wishlists. The chart does not reward a single AAA look; it rewards a concept players can understand and remember. 

What This Means for Investors 

Let's be clear about the main asset here: a genuine wishlist base is the closest thing this industry has to pre-sold demand. It is not hype. It is a proven audience that already raised its hand, and a launch you can forecast. That is exactly why the number deserves careful reading. 

What you have read is only the high-level layer of the work. Underneath it, our analytics team monitors the wishlist charts continuously, tracks position changes monthly, and once a quarter reruns the full deep pass: data collection, event verification, manual classification of every title. The chart moves fast enough to deserve it. 

The pattern we keep seeing is simple: a large share of independent games command player demand fully comparable to big-budget titles and long-running franchises, which means they can deliver comparable sales without comparable budgets. We back studios on both sides of that line, and the results show up on this very chart.

Two portfolio titles left the top 100 recently for the best possible reason: they launched, REPLACED into full release with over 1M estimated wishlists, and Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era into Early Access with more than 1.5M. Others are still climbing: ILL and Atomic Heart 2 currently sit in the top 100, with The Cube, Enginefall and The Eternal Life of Goldman in the top 150. 

That is the opportunity we are built to find: real, measurable demand before a game ships, whichever side of the line it sits on. A six-figure wishlist base doesn't guarantee a hit, but it changes what a studio can do, strengthening every conversation with publishers, platforms and investors. The path to it isn't easy, but as this study shows, the patterns behind it are far more legible than they first appear. 

Research Methodology

The analysis uses a June 30, 2026 snapshot of Steam's top-100 wishlist ranking. Wishlist figures are estimates based on Gamalytic data, combined with daily historical series and manual verification of every announcement and major promotional event; they are analytical estimates, not numbers disclosed by Steam or developers. 

We split the top 100 into two groups: independently developed, non-franchise games built on new IP, which we call indie, and everything else, which we group under the AAA label for simplicity. "AAA" here is shorthand for the comparison group, not a strict budget classification.

By announcement we mean the project's first public reveal: the moment the game became publicly known and wishlistable, even if that was a quiet post weeks before a bigger showcase moment, and even without a trailer. An announcement or a major beat usually lands on several channels at once: the showcase stage, the studio's own channels, press and platform channels. In those cases we credited the most visible one, so venue categories are not fully mutually exclusive.

The impact of each event is measured as wishlist growth over its first 30 days. Growth could be reliably measured for 112 of the 119 events we identified, including 43 of the 50 announcements; averages and medians are computed on those measurable cases. We counted a reveal as a breakout if it brought the game more than 200k wishlists or at least 20% of its current total: this is our internal heuristic, not an industry standard.

Genre, setting and mood classifications are deliberately simplified into broad categories, and each game carries one dominant label per dimension, even where several could reasonably apply.