How to get Steam wishlists (and which ones actually turn into players)

Step 01: Put up the Coming Soon page first

Every post, trailer and reply you make before the store page exists is wasted, because there is nowhere to click "Add to wishlist". Valve's own top suggestion is the same: put the page up as soon as you can.

The rules from Valve's Coming Soon documentation:

1. Click Create New App in Steamworks and finish everything under Your Store Presence on the app landing page.
2. Hit Mark As Ready For Review at least 7 business days before you want the page live.
3. After approval, click the green Post as Coming Soon button. The page must be public for at least 2 weeks before you can release.

Valve also says there is no strong downside to a long Coming Soon period, and that someone who wishlists two years ahead can be just as likely to buy as someone who wishlists two weeks ahead. Start early. O'BLOCK went into launch day with 61 wishlists added in total, a small list for the one email that matters most.

Step 02: Make the capsule and first screenshot earn the click

Steam shows your capsule far more often than anyone visits. In our most recent week, O'BLOCK had 88,117 impressions and 4,150 visits: about 4.7% of impressions became a visit. Every point of click-through here is worth more than a week of posting.

• Open Marketing & Visibility > Traffic Breakdown in Steamworks. It lists impressions and visits per source (Coming Soon list, tag pages, search, queues).
• Change one thing at a time (main capsule, first screenshot, short description) and note the date, so you can read the before and after.
• Size every asset exactly; our Steam capsule resizer outputs every required capsule size from one image.

Step 03: Tag every outside link with UTM, and read tracked visits

Steam records UTM tags on links to your app page or a sale page and counts a conversion if the visitor wishlists, buys or claims within 72 hours. The format, from Valve's example:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/480?utm_source=x&utm_campaign=launch_trailer&utm_medium=social

Then read the report the honest way. UTM Analytics shows three kinds of visit: total, trusted (bots and crawlers removed) and tracked (visitors signed in to Steam). Only tracked visits can convert.

Two weeks of every tagged link we posted, mostly X and SteamDB. Steamworks UTM Analytics for O'BLOCK, read Oct 24 2026.

Our two weeks of tagged links: 460 visits, 220 trusted, 34 signed in, 2 wishlists. More than half the "visits" were bots or crawlers, and only about 1 in 6 trusted visitors was logged in to Steam. Our X posts alone sent 66 tagged visits through Oct 23, of which 3 were signed in. Social posting feels like marketing; this is what it measured as.

Step 04: Get onto Steam's own surfaces

Look at the hero chart again. Of 4,150 visits in one week, Steam's own shelves (browse search 682, new releases queue 188, direct search 173, Valve's website 172, discovery queue 135, tag pages 99, library 68, search suggestions 67) brought 1,584. Direct navigation, typed URLs and links that arrive without a referrer, brought 1,285. External websites, where our off-Steam links show up when the referrer survives, brought 138. Steam's shelves are the traffic. Your job is to qualify for more of them.

• Steam Next Fest runs three times a year (February, June, October), and each game can join once, before release, with a public playable demo. Valve's workback timeline: submit the demo for build review 3 weeks before the fest (5 weeks if you want it live for the Press Preview, which starts 11 days before), and release it at least 30 minutes before the start.
• Themed fests (Valve's documentation lists more than a dozen upcoming ones, from Shop Keeper Fest to Racing Fest) put you on a page full of players who already like your genre.
• Tags decide which tag pages and recommendations you land on. Set them to match what the game is, not what is popular.
• After release, update visibility rounds give you more front-page exposure for real updates; we broke those down in Steam visibility rounds, explained.

Festival wishlists are the ones Zukowski found convert worst. Take them anyway: they are free, and the release email does not care how a wishlist was earned.

Step 05: Line up the emails Steam sends for you

This is where wishlists turn into players, and you control the timing. From Valve's wishlist documentation, Steam emails your wishlisters:

1. At release (Early Access or full), and again when Early Access moves to full release.
2. Once for a demo, when you press the notification button on the demo's landing page within two weeks of the demo going live.
3. On a discount of 20% or more that covers your cheapest package and runs longer than 8 hours.

Each player gets at most one email per game every 1 to 2 weeks, longer during big seasonal sales, and only if they verified their email with Steam.

The one email Steam sent for us. Steamworks wishlist breakdown, email notifications section, read Oct 24 2026.

Our release email went to 50 wishlisters on October 20. 12 claimed the game within a day and 18 within a week: 36%. O'BLOCK is free, so a "conversion" is a claim, not a sale; a paid game should expect less. The lesson still holds: the email is the strongest thing on Steam you control, so do not fire it on a build that is not ready.

Step 06: Read the wishlist report every day, and log it

Open the Sales & Activation Reports portal, pick your app, and scroll to Wishlists. It shows additions, deletions and purchases, with a regional breakdown in the regional sales report. The data is updated daily for the previous day, so today's posts show up tomorrow.

Log the outstanding number once a day next to what you did that day. Ours: 94 wishlists added lifetime, 9 deleted, 35 converted, 50 still outstanding as of October 24. Our Steam wishlist calculator turns that number into a first-week sales range, and the Steam revenue calculator shows what Valve keeps.