Steam Wishlists Guide (Updated 2023)

Why Are Steam Wishlists Important?

I’ll begin from the perspective of the Steam player.

With an average of 159 new games releasing on Steam every week, it’s impossible to keep track of everything. With a wishlist, players can add interesting games to an organized list for a future purchase.

From Valve’s perspective, the Steam store is adding more games than ever before. It’s not feasible to curate new releases and if they want to maximize profits, they need to match the right games to the right players at scale.

This is done through an algorithm that does a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to pair the right games with the right players while making sure top sellers receive the lions share of impressions.

That’s where wishlists come in. It’s an important metric that tells Steam what games are the most anticipated, which signals intent to purchase. It’s not the only metric that correlates with intent to purchase, but it is an important one.

For developers, the wishlist is incredibly important. It can help you better understand how well your promotional activity is going and can give you an idea of how well your game is going to sell. While wishlist/sale data isn’t available at scale, this article estimated the ratio from a small sample size to be roughly 0.5.

To clarify, Jake Birkett (the source of the above ratio) has defined the 0.5 ratio as the following: “Your pre-launch wishlists do NOT convert at 50%. What happens is they convert at about 10% (on average) and then you get 4x that amount of organic sales. This = 0.5 sales per wishlist.” (https://www.patreon.com/posts/cult-of-steam-35699090)

There are many placements on Steam that offer additional exposure that can be earned by having favorable metrics in comparison to other games releasing within the same window as yours. The best piece of real estate is the main capsule, which is on the homepage.

To have a chance at being featured on the homepage of Steam in the main capsule, you’ll need to aim for 50,000+ wishlists.

All Wishlists Are Not Alike

While wishlists are an indicator of purchase intent, they are not all the same. An excellent resource to review that goes over this can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cult-of-steam-35699090.

Essentially, tens of thousands of wishlists do not 100% solidify your upcoming launch as a success. The goal is to earn high-quality wishlists through a combination of targeted media outreach, influencer marketing, store presence optimization, and other tips throughout this guide. You want to drive quality traffic to your store page and convert that traffic into wishlists as doing so will increase your conversion rate, which Steam LOVES and hopefully will result in a snowball of traffic from the distribution platform.

Tags

During a talk at the GamesIndustry.biz Investment Summit at PAX Dev, Valve’s Alden Kroll shared some pre-release marketing tips that are all very helpful in driving more qualified traffic to your Steam page, which should result in an increase to wishlists. One of the more valuable tips being the use of tags.

Tags are described in the Steamworks section of Steam as terms that can be applied to your game, and visible on your store page. Tags help describe your game to customers and help Steam in recommending your game to the right audience.

Tags can be applied by customers, moderators, and developers. Yes, YOU can apply the tags that will help you in earning more qualified traffic, leading to an increase in wishlists and follows.

There are hundreds of tags to choose from, but only the top 15 tags are factored into what type of game Steam believes yours is similar to, resulting in recommended traffic.

You should be using more narrowed tags as the more specific you are, the easier Steam can identify the best matches in terms of similarity, resulting in a higher conversion rate and an increase to wishlists.

Screenshots

Screenshots are essential as players will cycle through them to identify familiar elements of your game that match favorable aspects of their favorite games.

The most important screenshots are the first four as they show up in search results as users hover their cursor over your listing.

Screenshots are also going to be one of the first things players look at on your store page.

The goal is to show off gameplay elements that best match your game to its genre as players will be looking for familiarity within their preferred genre.

For example, if you’re working on a physics-based puzzle game (tags would be physics + puzzle), you can look at games like Human: Fall Flat and see what four screenshots they are using with their page for inspiration.

If you were looking for a new JRPG to play and the first four screenshots of a game with the JRPG tag were of a racing game with no visual familiarity to the JRPG genre, you would most likely move on to the next title.

Now, if that same JRPG tagged game had screenshots of a racing game with JRPG elements like main characters in dialogue during a race, a character customization screen and an art style that matches the Speed Racer anime, you would be more likely to click on the search result to learn more about the game.

The goal is to match genre familiarity with elements that make your title unique within that genre.

Trailer

We all know how vital trailers are. That said, players are going to watch your trailer from unideal perspectives.

Most viewers will not watch your trailer in full screen with audio on from beginning to end (at least those that are finding out about your game via Steam recommendations).

For example, players that come across your game via the discovery queue will most likely spend less time evaluating your game and watching your trailer vs. someone from your community that’s already following the progress of your game.

On the trailers page of Steamworks, it’s even mentioned that you might have less than 10 seconds to stand out and those that are watching your trailer may be doing so without any audio.

With that in mind, I would recommend saving your beautiful animated trailer for your YouTube channel, and if you have to include it on your store page, consider moving it behind your gameplay-heavy trailer for those that have stumbled on your game through the Steam store.

The goal here is to use a trailer that blends genre familiarity with what makes your game unique while catering to those that are finding out about your game through Steam and are going to quickly scrub through your video for gameplay and other bits that stand out.

Segemented Media List

At this point, you should have a media list with tabs for each similar game that is full of targeted media outlets. Next, you need to organize your list by news beat.

In doing this, you can begin to align your news beats to media outlets when the time is right.

Create a new tab for each news beat and create columns for URL, contact, email, and any other columns you want to track (for example, you could include Company Twitter following as a way to sort contacts by social reach).

Then you can either copy/paste data from the other tabs or use correct functions to grab the data for you. I’m not a function mastermind, so I copy/paste the data.

Now you should have individual sheets for each news beat with the right contacts for each newsworthy moment.

Targeted Research

We have to find content creators that consistently produce excellent content for a dedicated audience that will be interested in our game.
To achieve this, we need to start by defining similar games (just like we did with traditional media targets).

Some games may have better results through traditional media vs. content creators and vise versa.
To identify the best 5 – 10 similar games when it comes to content creator success, you want to look for not only similarity but platform success.

A game can be very similar to yours. Still, if there aren’t many content creators playing it, it’s not a great candidate for what we’re trying to do (finding content creators that would be interested in playing your game in front of an audience that enjoys watching it).

For Twitch, you can use a site like TwitchMetrics.net to evaluate success.
Once you’ve documented your list of similar games that have had success on YouTube and Twitch, you need to find the best micro-influencers for your game.

The best website to use for finding content creators on Twitch is SullyGnome.com.
With SullyGnome.com, the process is very straightforward. We’ve established that we want to work with micro-influencers that have played similar games in front of an audience that enjoys watching those games.

Go to SullyGnome.com, and in the top right, click on the search bar and search by game title. Then click on the correct result.
Once you’re on the game page, define the date range you want to gather data for and click on Most Watched.

Doing this will populate a list of 50 channels that you can change by clicking the “50” in the drop-down menu. You can change the list to show up to 100 at a time. You can also define the channel language that you want to show up in the results.

The best part about all of this is that you can download all listings as a CSV or Excel file.

Once you have your CSV file, you can filter listings by follower size (again, we are targeting micro-influencers within the range of 1,000 and 100,000 followers).

Then, you can sort by followers gained while streaming to get a good look at channels that play to an audience that will be more likely to enjoy watching your game.

UPDATE 03/12/2021 – The process of gathering YouTuber data has gotten significantly easier using a free Google Sheets template. See description below:

First, make sure to check out the detailed blog post on tracking YouTuber data via Google Sheets here. Then, grab the free Google Sheet template here. Shoutout to Yaniss Illoul for putting this together!

In case the spreadsheet gets removed, or no longer works, the old manual way of doing this is below.

Original:

For YouTube, the process is going to be more labor-intensive. We are going to use search queries to give us ideal results. We’re going to use the Linkclump Chrome extension to grab results and Google Sheets (or Excel) to organize our lists.

First, you want to search for [game title + gameplay]. You can also use advanced search operators like – to remove unwanted results. For example, if you don’t want trailers in your results, you could search [game title + gameplay -trailer].

Also, if you want to remove specific platforms, you could search [game title + gameplay + PC -Xbox -PlayStation]. The last thing you want is to send out a Steam key to a content creator that exclusively plays Nintendo Switch games.

We want to define a timeline that’s relatively recent as we want to find results from active content creators.
You can apply filters to help get better search results. For example, we’re looking for micro-influencers that play games they enjoy (it might sound silly, but a video doesn’t always mean they enjoyed that game).

To do this, I like to apply the filter “Playlist” (under Type).
Creating one video of a game doesn’t necessarily signal enjoyment, but a playlist does. It’s still not 100%, but more times than not, someone that’s creating a non-sponsored playlist of gameplay of one game is going to enjoy it.

Once you’ve got the results that you want to document into a spreadsheet, use Linkclump to copy them. If Linkclump is only copying the video URL, go to Linkclump options, and turn off smart select. Doing so will allow you to copy both video URLs and channel URLs at the same time.

In your spreadsheet, you want to create columns for Channel, Channel URL, Subscribers, Video URL, Email, Twitter, Name, and Notes.
Paste your Linkclump results under the Video URL and Channel URL columns.

From here, we can begin to extrapolate data from the URLs to fill out the rest of the spreadsheet.
Now before we begin the rest of this process, I need to stress that I’m not a spreadsheet wizard. I know the method I use is not the most efficient way to extrapolate the data I need, and if you happen to be a spreadsheet wizard, you might have a more efficient way to gather the required data.

That said, let’s get started.

First, we’re going to need to isolate the channel from the channel URL. To do this, I use the following function. Make sure you paste the function below in a separate column (I made a new column titled, Path).

=right(B2,len(B2)-32)

The above function strips out 32 characters to give us the channel data we need. Once you have your stripped URL, drag the row down the entire column to have a full column of clean rows. If you receive an error, check the cell selection and make sure it’s correct. The above function is targeting the cell B2. If you have your Channel URL column in another section, use that instead.

Now we’re going to grab data from Social Blade to fill out our YouTube profiles. To do this, in a new column, paste in the following URL:
http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/

Now we’re going to add the data from both newly created columns to give us a full Social Blade URL. To do this, in another new column, paste the following function:

=CONCATENATE(I2,H2)

With the above function, we are adding the values of cell I2 to the end of cell H2. Doing this gives us the full Social Blade URL we’re going to use when importing the rest of the data we need.

Now to get the full channel name, we will use the following function:

=IMPORTXML(J2,”//*[@id=’YouTubeUserTopInfoBlockTop’]/div[1]/h1″)

We use the above to pull the full URL from the recently created column, and the second part of the function is pulling the XML path. You can find this path by right-clicking on the channel name -> inspect -> copy -> XML path.

To make the above function work in Sheets, you need to replace the double quotes around the @id= part to single quotes. If you don’t, it won’t work.

Also, when pulling the full URL from another column (like we’re doing with the above example), don’t use any quotes.

Once you get the full channel name (not the characters + numbers channel, but the actual name), copy all the results and paste them into the channel column. If you get an error, click on “paste values only.”

To fill out the subscribers column, we’re going to do the same thing.

Copy the same Import XML function that we used above and change it to:

=IMPORTXML(J2, “//*[@id=’youtube-stats-header-subs’]”)

The function above is pulling the full Social Blade URL from before (located in the J2 cell for this example) and is pulling data from a new path on the Social Blade URL that is the subscriber number.

You can paste the above function straight under the Subscribers column, and again, when you paste results for the entire column, don’t forget to “paste values only”.

Now, you should have data for Channel, Channel URL, Video URL, and Subscribers. To gather Twitter URLs, search Google Channel + Twitter.

Finally, to get the correct email address, check the contact page of the YouTube channel. If that doesn’t work, check Twitter bios. If those don’t work, message them on Twitter and try your pitch there.

Personalized Messaging

Content creators’ needs aren’t 1:1 with journalists. For content creators, make sure to include your Steam key front and center.

I like to include “Steam Key Included” in the subject line and center/bold the key in the message, so they can’t miss it.

You also want to get them a visual, so they can make a snap judgment call if they would be interested in playing your game. I like to make small size GIFs for this purpose.

However, if your game isn’t very GIF friendly, you can use a top-notch screenshot. Under the piece of embedded media, include a link to the trailer.

Don’t forget your call-to-action. It might sound stupid, but not everyone will know what you want them to do with the information you send them unless you explicitly tell them.

Don’t take it personally if you don’t hear anything. It’s also acceptable to follow up (I like to follow up four business days after my original message). If I don’t hear anything after two messages, I cool off for a while before sending another message.

Events

Getting the most out of attending industry events is crucial. It’s commonly the most expensive marketing-related expense for indie game studios.

In-Person Events

There are tons of event-related guides and articles that can give you excellent tips on how to save money at events, how to best display your booth to attract the most foot traffic, how to network at these events, etc.

However, for this Guide, I would like to focus on growing wishlists, and you shouldn’t forget this while attending industry events. You can do a rough calculation to put a number on the value of showing off your game at an industry event using the calculation shared at the beginning of this guide (wishlist/sale ratio being roughly 0.5).

For example, if you earned 500 wishlists during a show and your game costs $20, then you could do the sloppy math of 500 wishlists * 0.5 = 250 sales. Then multiply the 250 projected sales by $20 (not factoring in Steam, publisher, or taxes), and you’re looking at a gross revenue of $5,000.

Now, if you used the above calculation alone to put a number on the event you’ve attended, then more times than not, you would conclude that the event wasn’t financially worth it. However, many other factors increase the value of attending events (such as networking and education).

Remember the call-to-action. It should be on takeaway cards, at the end of a demo, signs on your booth, etc.

You don’t have a lot of time at events to tell people to wishlist, so make sure if they stop by your booth, they don’t miss the call-to-action.

Lastly, I always recommend bringing a simple email signup sheet with no incentive (aside from in-game items) to leave an email address. I recommend that you don’t include an incentive like a TV giveaway as it mucks up your email list. It’s better to have a smaller list of interested players vs. a bigger list of people that want a free TV.

Online Events

Online events are an excellent opportunity to grow your wishlists while keeping expenses to a minimum.

During the Spring 2020 Steam Game Festival, Broken Arms Games shared data from the event for their game Hundred Days that was very positive. Throughout the five day event, Hundred Days had earned 11,149 wishlists (using the 0.5 wishlists/sale ratio, they earned between $55,745 and $111,490 in gross revenue depending on launch pricing).

Took us a little bit more then expected but finally here a metrics report from last #steamgamefestival, those are our data from #HundredDays winemaking sim, maybe those numbers can help other devs out there …#indiedev #gamedev #businessdevelopment #gamebiz #bizdev #steamgame pic.twitter.com/mHrf4HVWkA

— Broken Arms Games (@brokenarmsgames) March 31, 2020

The takeaway here is to keep an eye out for any online-only events that you can participate in with a free demo, and if you have a chance to get into a Steam-partnered online event, do it!