Question 1

How many sales should I expect per wishlist?

Accepted Answer

The published planning range is 5% to 20% of your launch-day wishlists converting in week one, with the median around 11% and games carrying 25,000+ wishlists landing nearer 15%. The calculator defaults to the full 5-20% band rather than a single number, because a point estimate implies precision that no public dataset supports. Steam does not publish per-game conversion data, so anything narrower than a band is a guess wearing a decimal point.

Question 2

Can I use a follower count instead of a wishlist count?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and the calculator will pull it from the Steam Community Hub automatically when you paste a store URL. It converts followers to wishlists at 9.6x to 12x, the documented pre-launch range. Be clear on what that means: wishlist counts are visible only to the game's owner in Steamworks, so a follower-derived figure is an estimate with real error bars, not a hidden number we found. If you have the Steamworks figure, enter that instead.

Question 3

Why does the net revenue figure differ from the revenue calculator?

Accepted Answer

This tool deducts Steam's revenue share and nothing else, because its job is to get from wishlists to a launch-week order of magnitude. The Steam Revenue Calculator models the full waterfall: discount, regional pricing mix, VAT extracted before Steam's share, then refunds. For a real budget, take the unit range from here and put it through that calculator.

Question 4

How does the goal-seek mode work?

Accepted Answer

It inverts the same arithmetic. You give it a net revenue target and a price, and it solves for the wishlists you would need at each end of the conversion band, inverting Steam's actual tiered revenue share rather than assuming a flat 30%. The gap between the two numbers it returns is the point of the exercise: it is the cost of converting badly, expressed in wishlists you would otherwise have to go and earn.

Question 5

Why isn't there an option for having an email list or Discord?

Accepted Answer

An earlier version of this tool offered a 15-25% band for studios with an owned pre-launch channel. That band was removed because the number behind it did not support the claim: the underlying result was a free-to-play activation rate, not a paid sales-to-wishlist rate, and nothing published supports promising 15-25% paid conversion. Owning a channel genuinely helps, because Steam notifies a wishlister exactly once and you can message them more than once. We are not willing to attach an invented multiplier to it.

Question 6

Is this a forecast of what my game will earn?

Accepted Answer

No. It is arithmetic over the numbers you supply, so the output is exactly as reliable as your wishlist count and your assumption about conversion. Genre, price, review sentiment, launch timing and competition all move real conversion and none of them are inputs here. Use it to pressure-test a plan, not to set a revenue target you then defend.

Step	What happens
Wishlist basis	Your reported count is used directly. A follower count is converted at 9.6x-12x and labelled an estimate.
Conversion band	5-20% by default. Picking the 11% median or 15% high-wishlist figure narrows it to a ±2pp band around that rate.
Units and gross	Wishlists multiplied by each end of the band, then by your launch price.
Net	Steam's tiered revenue share only. VAT, regional pricing, discounts and refunds are the revenue calculator's job.

Steam Wishlist Calculator

What the calculator does, step by step

Why the range is wide, and why we keep it that way

Related

Steam Wishlist Calculator FAQs

The growth engine games use to launch with momentum, grow wishlists effectively, see which channels work, turn wishlists into buyers, stop guessing what works, and sell their next game.

The growth engine games use to launch with momentum, grow wishlists effectively, see which channels work, turn wishlists into buyers, stop guessing what works, and sell their next game.

The growth engine games use to launch with momentum, grow wishlists effectively, see which channels work, turn wishlists into buyers, stop guessing what works, and sell their next game.