Games released on Steam between 2023 and 2025 sold an average of 0.22 copies per wishlist in their launch month, half the 0.45 copies per wishlist achieved by games released in 2020-2022, according to an analysis of 160 titles by game marketing consultant Chris Zukowski, published on his How To Market A Game blog. The figure confirms what developers have suspected for several years: Steam wishlists have inflated, and each one now converts to fewer sales.

Zukowski tested the so-called "wishlist inflation" theory — the idea that users add games to wishlists more often but buy proportionally fewer of them — by splitting the 160 games into two cohorts. The first group launched during the rise of Steam Next Fest and other platform festivals between 2020 and 2022. The second launched between 2023 and 2025, after Valve began selecting festivals for the Steam homepage more selectively. He excluded 2026 data because the year has not ended.

What do the numbers show?

The conversion gap does not close after the launch window. By the end of their first year on sale, 2023-2025 releases moved roughly 0.7 copies per wishlist, against 0.99 copies for the 2020-2022 cohort. In plain terms: a studio with 50,000 wishlists at launch in 2021 could have expected around 22,500 launch-month sales, while the same count today points to closer to 11,000.

Zukowski identified several likely drivers of the decline:

• Lower friction. Valve has made adding games to wishlists easier; users can now wishlist a title without opening its store page. For many players, wishlists now function as bookmarks rather than purchase intent.
• Festival volume. The number of games participating in Steam festivals is growing rapidly, and wishlists accumulate accordingly during those events.
• Marketing maturity. Developers have become more proficient at driving wishlist additions than they were three years ago, inflating counts before launch.

Do wishlists still matter for forecasting?

Yes, according to the data. Despite the shift in the conversion coefficient, the statistical relationship between wishlist counts and sales has held nearly steady in recent years, Zukowski found. Wishlist totals therefore remain a reliable indicator of a game's commercial potential — studios simply need to apply updated conversion rates rather than the older benchmarks.

Zukowski also flagged wishlist velocity — the rate at which users add a game to their lists — as a complementary forecasting metric. Velocity alone predicts sales with nearly the same accuracy as raw wishlist counts, and combining both metrics modestly improves prediction accuracy.

"It is hard to wrap your mind around it… but both things are true: wishlist counts have inflated (each wishlist sells fewer units), but wishlists predict sales just as well as they did 3 years ago. As an analogy to the real world… just because the cost of living is going up doesn't mean we don't have to pay rent," Zukowski concluded.

What changes for studios?

The practical consequence is benchmark recalibration. Studios still budgeting against the old rule of thumb that roughly half of wishlists convert in year one should revise expectations downward by about 30% — from 0.99 to 0.7 copies per wishlist — when modeling revenue for upcoming releases.

The second consequence concerns launch planning: if wishlist velocity tracks predictive power as tightly as Zukowski's data suggests, marketing teams gain a second, earlier signal for sizing launch discounts, ad spend, and server capacity.

Zukowski's dataset covers 160 games through 2025; whether the 0.7 year-one conversion figure stabilizes or continues to erode in 2026 is the number worth watching.