How to check Steam wishlists: your own game, and estimating any other

Steam does not show wishlist counts on store pages. Only a game's developer or publisher can see the real number, inside Steamworks. That still leaves two useful questions with good answers: where exactly do you check your own wishlists (and what do the numbers mean), and how do you estimate how many wishlists another game has?

This post covers both, using Valve's Steamworks documentation for your own data and GameDiscoverCo's published survey for estimates. Where a figure is an estimate rather than something Valve publishes, we say so.

The short answer

How to check your own game's wishlists in Steamworks

Valve's Wishlists documentation puts your wishlist data on each app's details page in the Sales & Activation Reports portal (the financial reporting site you reach from Steamworks). The Wishlists section tracks:

• Additions: players adding your game to their wishlist.
• Deletions: players removing it.
• Purchases: wishlisters who bought the game.

Two details catch people out:

• It runs a day behind. Valve says wishlist data "is updated daily for the previous date", so on 2 March you see everything up to 1 March. A launch or a fest day will not show until the next day.
• Countries are in a different report. The breakdown by region or country lives in the Regional sales report section for the app, not in the main wishlist chart.

Players can start wishlisting as soon as your store page is publicly visible, which is why Valve's first best-practice tip is to put a Coming Soon page up as early as you're ready. If you have not reached that step yet, our guide on how to publish a game on Steam covers the order of things.

See what your wishlist emails did

Steam emails or sends a mobile notification to wishlisters when your game launches (including Early Access, and again at full release), when you run a qualifying discount, and once when you release a demo. Valve's docs list the discount rules: 20% or more, running for more than 8 hours, and applied to at least your lowest-priced package. There is also a cooldown: a player notified about your app in the last two weeks won't get another email until it passes, and Valve may extend it during big sales.

To see what those emails did, Valve points to two places:

1. Traffic: on your App Landing Page, Marketing & Visibility → Traffic Breakdown shows visits that came from the email.
2. Conversions: on the financial reporting site, click View detailed wishlist breakdown and scroll to the bottom to see the notifications sent in the period you picked.

If you are planning a demo, remember the demo notification is a single button press within two weeks of the demo first going live. Our Next Fest demo tips cover when to use it.

Pull your wishlists automatically with the Steamworks API

If you want your wishlist numbers in a spreadsheet or dashboard without downloading reports, Valve's IPartnerFinancialsService has a GetAppWishlistReporting method. According to the docs:

• It needs a Financial Web API key. You create a "Financial API Group" on the Manage Groups page in Steamworks, and the key appears on that group's page. It can read financial data for every app on your partner account, so Valve recommends adding whitelisted IPs and treating it like a password.
• You ask for one app and one date at a time. Dates are GMT here, unlike the sales calls, which use Pacific time.
• Each day returns adds, deletes, purchases and gifts, adds split by Windows, Mac and Linux browsing, and the same totals by country and by language.
• Data refreshes at least once a day. Unlike sales data, a closed day doesn't change later, so you only need to fetch each date once after it ends. An app_min_date field tells you the earliest date available.

The language split is worth a look. If a large share of new wishlists comes from players browsing in a language your store page doesn't support, translating the page is one of the cheaper fixes you can make.

WishlistLab Pro does this for you if you'd rather not write the code: upload your wishlist CSV or add a Financial API key for a daily pull, and your wishlists sit next to your weekly page audit scores, visible only to you. It's included in Solo, Studio and Agency, see integrations and pricing.

What to look for in your own numbers

A single total says less than the pattern behind it. When you open the report, check:

• Your steady daily rate. Ignore one-off spikes such as a fest or a viral post and look at the typical day over the last 30 days. That baseline is what you can project forward with the Steam wishlist forecast.
• Deletions against additions. Some deletions are normal. A spike that quickly drains away usually means the people who wishlisted weren't really your audience, which is a common side effect of "wishlist to enter" giveaways.
• Where the adds come from. Match jumps in adds to what you did that day (a trailer, a stream, a fest), and check the country and language splits.
• What happened after each email. Purchases right after a launch or discount email show how warm your list is.

How to estimate another game's wishlists

Wishlists are private, but followers are public. Valve's Followers documentation explains that following a game means joining a mostly hidden game group, and the follower count is shown as the group's members. You can read it on a game's Steam community hub, and SteamDB shows followers for any game with historical charts.

GameDiscoverCo surveyed 125+ unreleased Steam games in June 2023 for their follower-to-wishlist multiplier:

• The median was 12× (average 12.37×). Most games had between 7× and 20× as many wishlists as followers.
• Their February 2021 survey had found 5× to 14× with a median of 9.6×, so the ratio has risen over time.
• It varies by genre. The average was lower for deep strategy games (4X 7.5×, turn-based strategy 9.0×, survival 9.5×) and higher for calmer or story-led games (story-rich 13.2×, relaxing 15.7×, puzzle 15.9×). Players of complex games that post lots of news are more likely to follow.

So the method is:

1. Read the game's follower count.
2. Multiply by 7 and by 20 for a range, and by 12 for a middle estimate.
3. Nudge the middle towards the genre figures above if the game fits one of them.

Worked example (invented numbers): an upcoming puzzle game has 2,000 followers. The range is 14,000 to 40,000 wishlists, the plain median estimate is 24,000, and puzzle's 15.9× average would put it nearer 32,000. Say "roughly 15,000 to 40,000, probably towards the upper half", never "32,000".

Treat these as estimates. The survey is from 2023, it's self-reported, and some games sit well outside the range.

Use Steam's Top Wishlists ranking for context

Steam's own search can sort games by wishlists: open Steam search sorted by Top Wishlists. It gives a rank, not a count, and the top of the list is dominated by big-budget games, so it's most useful for spotting whether a comparable indie game is climbing or slipping over a few weeks.

Find your own multiplier

Your own follower count is on your game's Manage Members page in the Steam community (Valve's docs link it as steamcommunity.com/games/<appid>/membersManage, signed in with your developer account). Divide your real wishlists by your followers and you have your own multiplier. It's a better yardstick than the median when you compare yourself with similar games: estimate theirs at your ratio and at 12×, and see where you sit.

Common mistakes when checking wishlists

• Comparing games at different stages. A page that has been up for two years and one that went live last month aren't comparable on totals. Compare growth over the same weeks instead.
• Quoting an estimate as a fact. Followers × 12 is a rule of thumb. Always give a range.
• Treating wishlists as sales. Valve says there's "no formula to accurately predict sales from wishlists". For a sensible first-week range, use the wishlist to sales calculator, and read how many wishlists you need to launch before you pick a date.
• Forgetting the page. Every wishlist starts with someone deciding your store page looks worth tracking. If your daily rate is flat, the page is often the cheapest thing to fix.

Turn more visitors into wishlists

Checking the number is the easy part. Moving it means more people seeing your page and more of them clicking the button. Valve's own docs say wishlists are mostly not a direct visibility factor, so read how the Steam algorithm works for what does count, and the page-first guide to getting more wishlists for the fixes.

Then run a free WishlistLab audit: paste your Steam link and get a score out of 100, your biggest fix and a rewritten short description on screen in about 20 seconds, no email needed. For weekly re-audits with your wishlists tracked alongside, see WishlistLab Pro pricing.

Sources

• Steamworks: Wishlists (checked 9 November 2026)
• Steamworks: IPartnerFinancialsService, GetAppWishlistReporting (checked 9 November 2026)
• Steamworks: Followers (checked 9 November 2026)
• GameDiscoverCo: Why your Steam 'follower to wishlist' multiplier matters! (June 2023 survey)