The headline numbers
Wishlist counts at launch scale with revenue tier. Launches landing in the $10K-$249K range, the most common outcome for a self-published Steam release, typically run under 7,000 wishlists, alongside 100-200 reviews. Launches clearing $250K-$999K typically show up with 30,000-50,000 wishlists at launch and 500-1,000+ reviews. Seven-figure launches typically clear 100,000 wishlists.
The 7,000 figure also comes up as a rough floor for Popular Upcoming visibility and Next Fest's higher-tier placement, though plenty of games clear 7,000 and still land in the lower revenue tier. The number describes what tends to accompany an outcome; clearing it doesn't guarantee one.
Wishlists convert to sales at a fairly narrow rate
At the median, roughly 15% of wishlists convert to a week-one sale for games launching with 25,000 or more wishlists. Smaller launches convert closer to 17%, and premium titles priced above $10 see a conservative floor around 10%. That conversion band is why the revenue tiers scale the way they do: a 30,000-wishlist launch converting near the median produces roughly 4,500-5,100 week-one units, in the range that lines up with the $250K-$999K tier once average price is applied.
Genre matters more than the aggregate number suggests. Separate tracking of games that reach 1,000+ reviews (a rough hit-rate proxy for a genre, not a conversion rate) shows wide variance: roughly 20.8% of Open World Survival Craft releases clear that bar, versus roughly 0.18% of 2D Platformer releases. A platformer studio sitting mid-tier on wishlists is doing well for its genre; the same count in survival craft, a genre with a much higher hit rate, can mean the studio is underperforming its category.
Steam Next Fest raises the floor, but only above a certain point
Next Fest delivers a documented 3-10x wishlist velocity boost during the event. The two biggest predictors of how much a game gains are its total wishlists at event time and its recent wishlist growth rate going in. A game entering with fewer than roughly 500 wishlists typically sees minimal benefit: the event amplifies existing momentum rather than manufacturing it. Each studio can only enter Next Fest once, so the wishlist count walking in matters more than for almost any other visibility moment on Steam.
How to apply this to your launch
Treat the ranges above as a directional check on revenue trajectory, not a fixed number to hit and stop. Adjust expectations for genre before reacting to a raw count; a mid-tier number in a low-hit-rate genre is a different signal than the same number in a high-hit-rate one. And remember the number that actually predicts week-one revenue is the wishlist count multiplied by a realistic conversion rate for your price point and pre-launch activation, not the wishlist count alone.
Studios that pair wishlist capture with an owned, activatable audience, email, Discord, segmented by engagement, consistently land nearer the top of their tier's conversion range instead of the bottom. Immutable's conversion funnel is built around that gap: it pairs the wishlist with a direct channel so the studio can nurture and activate that audience all the way through launch day, instead of relying on the wishlist as the only touchpoint. More on what that conversion rate actually looks like industry-wide is in our wishlist conversion rate benchmark.
Sources: Revenue-tier wishlist ranges and genre hit-rate variance based on published Steam benchmark data and field research on wishlist thresholds, 2025. Wishlist-to-week-1-sales conversion benchmarks and Steam Next Fest's wishlist velocity boost from industry wishlist-conversion analysis (2024-2025) and Steamworks' own Next Fest documentation.
