Every figure on this page carries its sample size, time window, and method, and links to the full analysis behind it. Numbers we could not source do not appear. When two benchmarks disagree, the reason is almost always that they divide different things; each section states its formula so you can compare like with like.
Wishlists to Week 1 sales: 10 to 11% median
The planning ratio for a paid game in 2026 is 10 to 11 Week 1 sales per 100 launch wishlists. In practice: a game entering launch week with 20,000 wishlists lands near 2,000 to 2,200 Week 1 units at the median.
| Cohort | Median | Sample and window |
|---|---|---|
| All paid launches | ~11% | GameDiscoverCo, June 2026 analysis |
| Games with 25,000+ wishlists | ~15% | GameDiscoverCo, 2024-2025 dataset |
| Games priced above US$10 | ~10% | GameDiscoverCo, 2024-2025 dataset |
Method: total Week 1 paid units divided by the wishlist balance at launch. That includes buyers who never wishlisted, so it is not the percentage of wishlisters who buy, and it is not comparable with a direct wishlist-purchase rate. Individual outcomes vary by 10 to 20x between games with similar wishlist counts. Full context, including why the popular 20%-then, 5-10%-now decline story does not survive contact with the public evidence: Steam wishlist conversion rates.
Next Fest gains scale with the audience you bring
Immutable's predictive ranking analysis covered 16,878 games across seven Steam Next Fest cohorts, February 2024 to February 2026. Pre-festival audience size explained about 60% of the variance in outcomes. Steam keeps wishlist totals private, so tiers use public follower counts; the survey multiplier below converts between the two.
| Pre-fest followers | Games | Median gain | P90 gain |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-500 | 14,899 | 11 | 250 |
| 500-1K | 849 | 114 | 410 |
| 2.5K-5K | 369 | 357 | 1,271 |
| 10K-25K | 141 | 1,227 | 4,298 |
| 100K+ | 7 | 8,133 | 23,458 |
Gains are follower gains during the festival. In practice: crossing 500 pre-festival followers, roughly 4,800 estimated wishlists, moved the median gain from 11 to 114, a tenfold jump. Day 1 is an early tell in the same data: games gaining at least 6 followers on Day 1 finished with a median total gain of 108, against 8 for games that gained none. The full nine-tier table and the entry-readiness thresholds: how many wishlists is good for Steam Next Fest. To see which festivals your game is actually eligible for, use the Steam Festival Finder.
Wishlists per follower: median 12
A 2023 industry survey of more than 125 unreleased games found a median of about 12 wishlists per follower (average 12.37), with most games between 7 and 20. An earlier 2021 survey found a median of 9.6. In practice: a game showing 2,000 followers likely holds somewhere near 24,000 wishlists, and anywhere from 14,000 to 40,000 would be unremarkable.
Method: self-reported wishlist and follower counts from unreleased games. Use the ratio to estimate audience size, not to forecast one game precisely; it varies by genre and by how the audience was built. Full context: Steam followers vs wishlists.
Demo players to wishlists: 16.33% median
The best transparent benchmark available is a public Steam Next Fest developer survey: 12% at the 30th percentile, 16.33% median, 20% at the 70th percentile of demo players converting to wishlists. In practice: 1,000 demo players at the median produce about 163 wishlists, and around 200 is a strong result for comparable festival traffic.
Method: self-reported festival results; Valve publishes no platform-wide benchmark for unique demo players or peak concurrency, so player-count targets should come from comparable campaigns rather than a universal number. Full context: Steam demo benchmarks.
How this page stays honest
- Every figure names its sample size, window, and formula. A number without all three is not on this page.
- No blended averages across formulas: a Week 1 sales ratio and a direct wishlist-purchase rate are different measurements and are never presented as one series.
- Last updated 23 August 2026. Figures are refreshed when their source insights are, and each section links to the insight that owns its number.
Sources: GameDiscoverCo Week 1 sales-to-wishlist analyses (June 2026; 2024-2025 dataset); Immutable predictive ranking analysis of 16,878 games across seven Steam Next Fest cohorts, February 2024 to February 2026; industry wishlist-to-follower multiplier surveys (2021, 2023); public Steam Next Fest developer survey on demo conversion.
