Why Your Indie Game NEEDS Steam Wishlists
The success of your game hinges on the number of people who want to play it.
Welcome back to this week’s lesson from Solo Gamedev School!
Today we’re going to talk about the importance of Steam wishlists.
Just yesterday I started gathering wishlists for my latest game, so I thought I’d share some tips while I’m still thinking about it.
What is a Wishlist?
When you put a game on Steam’s marketplace, potential customers have the ability to click a button to add the game to their “wishlist.”
As the name implies, a Steam wishlist is just a list of all the games that someone wants to play, but isn’t ready to buy right now.
Especially on Steam, players will often wait until a discount or sale event (such as the Winter Sale or Summer Sale) to snag the game at a deeply lowered price.
During these sales, the player will receive an e-mail from Steam telling them the game is discounted — a quick reminder that they wanted the game — and if the discounted price meets their budget, they’ll go ahead and open their wallet for you.
While this is a nice way to get paying customers from those who aren’t immediately ready to buy at full price, there is a second, more important role that wishlists fulfill.
Why Wishlists Matter on Launch Day
The most important time for your indie game is its release day.
The way the Steam algorithm works is a secret, but there are a few obvious things we can figure out about it from logical deduction and inference.
Valve is a company that wants to make money, and in order to make as much money as possible, they want to connect gamers with good games.
The most obvious indicators of a good game are a large review count with a very high percentage of those reviews being positive.
Therefore, in order to propagate your game through Steam, you want to have as many positive reviews on launch day as you can.
And pre-release reviews from keys that you give away for free don’t count.
So the only way to get a lot of positive reviews on launch day is to get a lot of players buying the game on launch day.
And the only way to get a lot of players buying the game on launch day is to remind them all on launch day to go and buy the game!
You see, players can actually wishlist games that aren’t released yet.
This means you can accumulate a large following of people who you can “remind” to buy your game on release day.
Maybe your potential buyers don’t check Twitter or Facebook every day for updates about your game — and even if they do, those social media algorithms may not show it to them — but they most likely do check their e-mail inbox.
This is why it is so important to build up a large amount of wishlists before your game launches — it will decide whether your game is a hit or a miss.
My recommendation is to put up your Steam page as soon as you can, but no sooner.
You don’t want to show off poor quality content or mislead anyone about your game contents, but you don’t need to wait until the game is close to being finished, either.
In fact, there are many good reasons to gather these wishlists during the months or even years that you spend working on your game.
Why Wishlists Matter During Development
Getting likes and retweets on your posts gives you a nice feeling of dopamine, but wishlists allow you to see exactly how many people truly want your game.
Thus you can estimate the potential sales of the game in its current state.
You can also estimate what parts of the game’s state need improvement:
Are you adding features that make people want to buy your game?
Do your screenshots or videos fail to catch interest, and why?
Does an audience even exist for your game in the first place?
A reasonable day-one conversion rate seems to be around 10% of wishlists will become actual buyers.
So it’s recommended to have at least 10,000 wishlists before launching your game, since that will probably convert into at least 1,000 sales on launch day.
If you’re selling your game on Steam for $15, you’d make $15,000 on day one — before Valve takes their 30%, leaving you with $10,000.
You probably don’t want to spend a year of your life working on a game for less than minimum wage, especially if you have the skills capable of making more.
Nor do you want to spend more than one year on a game — maybe 2, 3, or even 5 years — only to be paid a grand total of $10,000 because you didn’t do enough marketing.
You can use your wishlist numbers as real data points to help you keep yourself on the right track, especially if you look at your change in wishlists over time.
If you pay close attention to where most of your wishlists tend to come from, you can get a better idea of where your target audience lives online and can more accurately promote your game to them.
If you decide to have multiple unreleased games on Steam at the same time — which you can do — you can even compare wishlist numbers to see which game more people are interested in playing.
Why Wishlists Matter After Launch Day
Also, your wishlist has significant consequences extending beyond release day.
People tend to make purchasing decisions based on emotions over logic, and will tend to buy things that other people suggest are worth buying.
So when someone looks at your game on Steam and sees a tiny review score, they won’t know whether it’s actually worth buying.
They’ll just pass it up.
It’s a vicious cycle where no one is buying your game because nobody is buying your game.
But you can choose to put yourself in a different cycle: one where people are buying your game because people are buying your game.
That’s It!
Success as a solo developer heavily depends on your wishlist numbers.
Be sure to use these numbers to your advantage — to find your audience, make smart decisions, and make a game they truly wish to play!