The Way Steam Wishlists Work

Silksong is fucked

I don't like buying Early Access. When i see Early Access games that might interest me, they go on the wishlist until they get a full release.

Yeah, uh, my wishlist is so I can be told about sales, if your game never goes on sale (or only ever goes on 10 and 20% sales) I’m probably removing it from my list.
I’m not brainrotted enough yet that I need a wishlist for games I am really looking forward to. Those live in my head rent free

as someone with kids who doesn't get to play games as often as I used to, I wishlist stuff that pique's my interest, or hasn't been released yet, and if I get the time or money I'll check it out. my backlog is already big enough as it is, and a lot of stuff sits in limbo. I recently purged a lot, but I still have a decent chunk on the wishlist. Very few games I get on a launch hype train for, I maybe buy 2 games full price a year if that.

This is absolutely true, the longer something is in your Wishlist, the more likely it is that you will forget why you wanted it in the first place.

This has everything to do with the value of my money. I just want to feel like it was worth it. Will I ever feel like 70+ is worth it for a single game? No. Every game at that price goes on a wishlist until it comes down to where I personally feel it meets my money in worth. Just my process.

As developer I feel like thinking about things like this is just a pure waste of energy. Create good game is all I need to care about

The only reasons stuff is on my wishlist are

1. Im waiting for a sale

2. I forgot its on my wishlist

I wishlist things so I get reminded then they get on sale to unwishlist them and maybe one in ten I buy the game, maybe. My rule is never keep more than around 100 games on my wishlist, if a new one have to be added another must be removed.

Source?

They decay in the sense that they represent engagement you need for your game to be shown to more people.

Its really more about the timing of your marketing, you dont want to start to late, risking launching without any momentum. Or starting to soon, with all that engagment going nowhere because there is nothing to buy yet and people will forget/ loose intrest over time.

People should announce their games as soon as possible but only start seriously marketing once they know the release date IMO the "coming soon" on steam might aswell say "coming maybe"

Wish lists were an organic pipeline from interest to a sale in the beginning. Once devs realised the correlation and started to try and game the wish list system it's no longer about gamer's purchasing interests and they turned it into a marketing tactic.

I will only add the game to my wishlist in TWO cases:
1. Currently the price is too high and I want to get notified about the discount.
2. I'm interested in the game bur currently It's in early access (unfinished/unpolished) so I want to get notified when it's out.

This guy doesn't actually know anything about the algorithm. Everyone likes to think they know, but they don't.

Thanks for explaining the absolutely incoherent string of words that guy spat out

Sometimes I look at my wishlist and wonder what the hell I was thinking back then.

I mean it's right. If I wishlist a game and it goes on sale soon after, I'm prolly getting it. If I wishlist a game and months pass, then of it goes on sale I might not be as interested.

Any evidence to back this up? Or just a self proclaimed genius?

Who cares, how about the devs actually finish a decent amount of the game before putting it up as a wish list.

Would love to see the full video to get a source on this, because it doesn't seem to be general consensus yet. Can't for the life of me find it though!

What's not great is putting so much thought into what a computer wants and not people

This makes sense. If you wishlist a game, it goes on sale, you don't buy it, and it just sits in your wishlist forever, you're probably never going to buy it, so it's considered a worthless wishlist item at that point.

yet another thing ruined by algorithms while users simply wish list things they don't want to forget about or know when it goes on sale, yet companies always apply stupid algorithms that ruin mechanics like this and now it's just another like button instead, only more complicated because it decays over time in value, great.

Silksong

Umm what?

This is definitely one of those "okay, and?" sort of knowledge tidbits

I use wishlists because I'm hoping for a sale, and the listing is essentially a bookmark for myself, an indication that I WOULD like to be notified. If it never goes on sale, I'll probably never buy it.

I mean... my wishlist has never shrunk when you look at it month to month.

If I've ever bought a game off my wishlist? That same month I've added a minimum of 1 games to it.

Most games on my wishlist are YEARS old. Some are YEEAAARSSS old.

How devs want wishlists used and how players use their wishlist simply does not mesh.

And then he doesn't explain why lol

I just removed a few games from my wishlist, it's more of a way to keep track of games I'm interested in rather than willing to buy as soon as they're 30% off.

This guy saying it like its some huge secret or revelation. Yeah no shit sherlock.

This guy thinks people OK to wait perfect time to wishlist a game.

What you don't realize is that take it as a win whenever people wishlist your game because the only alternative is never wishlisting your game.

Wishlists are for me, the user. Not you, the developer.

Heaven forbid I should have any way at all to keep track of sales and save money on things I like. Instead of just being exploited and extracted for maximum value

This just says you need to have an active rollout and engage with the community in clear timelines, continued action will still accumulate more wishlists assuming the timeline isnt endless and always changing

This has been debunked. People who repeat this don’t look at the data in context. If you get 80k wish list in 3 months that means your game is extremely popular. 27k per month. If your game gets 80k wish lists in 5 years thats 1.3k wish list per month. That is a much better indicator of popularity which leads to conversions. Wish lists are built up over time. You don’t just start with 80k. For all we know these 2 game could have both gotten 500 wish list in the first 24h.

He can see one game is going to do better but the reasoning is incorrect because it doesn’t take into account the end product of the 5 year game, which can and should be improved compared to when the wishlist was made. Leading those old wishlists to be more like to convert.

With all the early access, sitting on a game for 5 years isn't a bad idea.

As a developer... this is profoundly stupid and inaccurate.

If you get 80k wishlists in 5 years, you are NOT getting 80k wishlists in a week, you are probably getting 500-1000 in that week at most. 80k will ALWAYS have better SEO on Steam than 500-1000, so you want to farm as many as you possibly can, and when you release you get steam's initial SEO bump.

Older wishlists do not "decay" or devalue. A sudden burst of visits to a page will boost you up... but that happens on release regardless.

Man, I love Rami

i wishlist on steam so that when sales comes, I'll buy 30 games for $50.

I'm gonna be honest I did not understand that hardly at all, but reading the comments here makes me feel like it's the devs that are confused. The wishlist is a feature for the CONSUMER to keep an eye on games they're interested in. It's not meant to be a metric for devs to watch to measure their games success.

Makes sense that the value decays if you've still not bought it after several months. Wishlisting to wait for a discount does not have the same meaning as wishlisting because you wanna buy asap.

this is something the publishers will never understand when showing off the wishlist entries for a game

I like games, but know I probably won't play them so I have my wish list.

That is a mighty long beard 😮

Wishlist = Game that may be fun, but I'm not paying full price for, or game that I am curious about but have no intentions of ever spending my own money on, but would check it out if given to me for free.

Somehow people's take on this video is "devs don't understand why players wishlist" or "he didn't explain it well", but I think in fact he's right on point: as a game stays more and more time on somebody's wishlist, it becomes more and more unlikely they buy it at full price, if at all". And that's completely true.

Nobody wishlists for the algorithm

I wishlist games for when I want to be notified when it goes on Sale, I am adamantly against high prices lol