How to get more Steam wishlists

Wishlists are the currency of a Steam launch. They are what prompts Steam to notify interested players the moment you release or discount, and a fast-growing wishlist count is one of the clearest signals that your game has an audience waiting for it. So it is no surprise that how to get more Steam wishlists is one of the most-asked questions in indie development.

Here is the part the hype skips: there is no magic number and no guaranteed algorithm. Wishlists come from doing a small number of things well, repeatedly, and then reading the results honestly. This guide walks through that process. We will treat getting traffic and converting it as two separate jobs on purpose, because blurring them together is how studios waste good campaigns.

Start by knowing where you stand 📍#

Before you try to grow anything, get an honest baseline. Write down your genre, your release stage, and how ready your store page actually is. Then track your daily wishlist additions and removals for a week or two, and note where your current traffic comes from.

This is not busywork. You cannot tell whether a campaign worked if you never knew what normal looked like. A week that adds 200 wishlists means something completely different for a game that usually adds 20 than for one that usually adds 300.

Nail your audience and your hook 🎯#

A wishlist is a small promise: this looks like my kind of game. To earn it, you have to know whose kind of game you are making. Name a handful of comparable games and study who plays them, what those players say, and what your game offers that they would care about. Boil it down to the one clear reason someone would wishlist after a few seconds on your page. If you cannot say that in a sentence, your store page cannot either.

Fix the store page before you drive traffic 🛍️#

This is the step most studios skip, and it quietly wastes everything that comes after. Your store page is where a curious click becomes a wishlist, so it has to convert.

Give it representative screenshots, a trailer that shows actual gameplay early, a description that leads with the hook, and accurate tags so Steam shows you to the right people. Sending a wave of traffic to a weak page is pouring water into a leaky bucket. Improving conversion is almost always cheaper than buying more traffic, so fix the bucket first.

Keep a short store page review checklist and run it before any campaign: capsule art reads at thumbnail size, the trailer opens on gameplay, the first line of the description states what the game is, tags match the genre, and the demo or Coming Soon call to action is obvious.

Pick a few acquisition channels 📣#

You do not need every channel. You need a few that fit your game and the time you actually have:

Creators. Well-fit streamers and YouTubers are one of the highest-converting sources of wishlists. Line them up in advance and brief them properly. Our creator tools help you find and manage them.
Demo moments and events. A demo during a showcase or Steam Next Fest is the single biggest wishlist swing most games get. More on that below.
Communities. Genre subreddits, Discords, and forums where your players already gather, engaged honestly rather than spammed.
Your existing players. Playtesters and followers on player.gg are warm, and warm players wishlist and tell friends.
Press and selective paid tests. Useful for some games, optional for many. Treat paid as a small experiment, not a default.

Run a weekly plan and tag every link 🗓️#

Wishlist growth is a rhythm, not a launch-week sprint. Build a simple weekly plan: pick one or two things to try, do them, and keep a short log of what you did and what happened. Limit yourself to a couple of active experiments at a time so you can actually tell what worked.

The non-negotiable habit here is tagging. Put consistent UTM tags on every external link you share, so that weeks later you can trace wishlists back to the specific creator, post, or campaign that drove them. Set this up before you start, not after. Our Steam UTM tracking guide covers exactly how.

Line up your demo moment 🎪#

If there is one thing to build your calendar around, it is a demo milestone. A well-run Steam Next Fest can move more wishlists in a week than months of steady effort, because Steam points its own traffic at playable demos. But it rewards preparation, so treat the fest as the finish line of a plan, not the plan itself.

Measure without fooling yourself 📊#

This is where most wishlist post-mortems fall apart. Keep three numbers separate and never let them blur:

Traffic: how many people visited your page.
Attributed actions: wishlists that came from your tagged links, within Steam’s reporting window.
Net wishlist change: total additions minus removals, from every source combined.

Those are not the same thing. According to Steam’s own analytics documentation, Steam counts tracked visits for logged-in users and reports conversions within 72 hours of a click on a tagged link, and total, trusted, and tracked visits all differ. Your net wishlist change includes Steam’s own discovery traffic, organic browsing, and everything else, so labelling that whole number the impact of your campaign is simply wrong. Report the tagged conversions and the overall change side by side, and be honest about the gap.

It is worth knowing what wishlists do and do not do, too. Per Valve’s visibility documentation, wishlists are not a direct factor in your algorithmic visibility, with a few exceptions like the Popular Upcoming tab. What they reliably do is trigger the launch and discount notifications, and signal demand. Chase the demand, not a rumoured threshold, because commonly quoted wishlist targets are third-party rules of thumb that vary by game and are not guarantees.

Decide what to repeat, improve, or stop 🔁#

At the end of each cycle, use the data to make one honest call per channel: repeat what worked, fix what underperformed, and stop what did not earn its time. Feed those decisions back into next week’s plan. A simple campaign tracker makes this easy and keeps you from relying on memory.

What this looks like for different teams#

These are illustrative shapes, not performance forecasts, because results vary with genre, audience, assets, timing, and luck:

A solo developer with limited hours picks one channel, usually creators or one community, does it consistently, and leans on a strong store page to do the rest.
A small studio preparing a demo builds everything toward a Next Fest, using playtests to sharpen the demo and creators to drive traffic during the week.
A publisher coordinating a release runs several channels in parallel with a shared calendar and tight tracking, so it can shift budget toward whatever converts.

Where FirstLook fits 🚀#

Growing wishlists is really a series of small campaigns, and the parts that decide them are the parts FirstLook is built for: recruiting playtesters who become early wishlisters, running the creator outreach that drives qualified traffic, and keeping your player relationships in one place. Just keep the line clear: FirstLook helps you run the campaign, and Steam’s own reporting is the source of truth for what happened. No tool generates wishlists on its own.

Ready to turn a plan into wishlists? Get started free on FirstLook.