Wishlists are one of the key metrics that developers pay attention to when preparing to launch their games. Here’s an interesting new analysis of how wishlists are converting to sales, and what that says about the state of Steam in general.
As Simon Carless reported in the latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter, the median wishlist-to-sales ratio for new games on Steam is 10.5%. This is based on a sample of all titles released on the platform between August and October 2024 that had at least 5,000 launch wishlists (with few exceptions).
Here are the key takeaways:
- The median conversion of 10.5% for first-week sales is lower than GameDiscoverCo expected, with Carless pointing out that it’s difficult to say whether it has decreased over time;
- The further a game is from the median, the faster the ratio drops — 90th percentile is just 1.9%, meaning that only 10% of all new games over the three-month period had a wishlist-to-sales conversion rate higher than 1.9%;
- There’re “only 15-30 games per month with >50% conversion, and a number of those had only 10k-ish wishlists”;
- The biggest hits usually have the highest conversion rates because hype around them outshines their wishlists — e.g. Black Myth: Wukong (290%), EA Sports FC 25 (511%), Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO (96%);
- Other games that tend to outperform the median rates are either titles with viral potential or surprise hits — e.g. Liar’s Bar (138%), Karate Survivor (282%), Backyard Baseball ’97 (145%).
This data shows that Steam is truly a hit-driven platform where developers have to compete not only with other new releases, but also with older ones that successfully retain players and are regularly discounted.
However, if a studio manages to launch a hit, the conversion rates and launch sales can exceed even the wildest expectations. According to Carless, the top 5 new games on Steam in 2024 — Black Myth: Wukong, Helldivers 2, Palworld, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 — generated $2.2 billion in gross revenue combined.
More data points can be found in a Google spreadsheet and in GameDiscoverCo’s full post.