The ratio of wishlists to followers on Steam: current multipliers for evaluation and what they indicate
Wishlists are one of the most important pre-release metrics for any game. We are publishing a comprehensive report to investigate how their numbers relate to the number of followers on Steam today. To do this, we collected and analyzed data from several hundred games, including those whose developers have publicly disclosed their metrics.
Methodology
- For this brief study, we first looked at the top 100 most anticipated games on Steam at the moment and examined two key metrics for each: the number of followers and wishlists.
- Followers are a public metric available to any Steam user. The SteamDB service also allows a look at historical values to understand how many people were following a game's page on a given date.
- Wishlists, as known, are visible only to developers. Hence, in assessing the number of wishlist additions, we relied on data from the service Gamalytic.
- To gather more data, we additionally extracted information on the top 200 titles from the chart of the most anticipated releases on Steam.
- To avoid relying solely on external service estimates, we also selected just over 100 games whose developers publicly announced the number of wishlist additions. This selection included titles of various genres and budgets—from indie projects with tens of thousands of wishlists to major releases and global hits.
- We only included games that disclosed their data on Steam (excluding other platforms). As a result, many AAA hits like Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, or the upcoming 007 First Light were not included since their developers often specify the total number of wishlists for both PC and consoles.
- Also, for the “official” wishlist data, all follower count data was taken on the date when a certain wishlist threshold was announced.
- Globally, the goal is quite simple — to see how the number of followers compares to wishlists using the most relevant examples today. The final multipliers were obtained using a simple formula:
F/W multiplier = Outstanding Wishlists / Followers
Based on the data obtained, we identified median, average, and other values, as well as some patterns.
