How 394 indie gamesgot their wishlists.
A year of developers’ own posts, read one by one. What brought the wishlists, what didn’t, and what the big ones did.
Three numbers.The short version.
who said what their demo did said it helped.
said Next Fest helped, against “did little”.
said short video didn’t work, against was their best.
What worked.And what they said didn’t.
For each channel, how many developers said it brought most of their wishlists, against how many named it as something that didn’t work. Press is one of the few that comes out ahead. Short video and X come out far behind.
165 developers said, in their own words, where most wishlists came from. 111 named something that didn’t work.
This single article dwarfed all my attempts of the previous 16 months in a single day.A developer at 725 wishlists, on one article about their game. Read the post
Next Fest splits people. Of 56 who said what it did, 34 said it helped and 22 said it did little, and those 22 didn’t have fewer wishlists than the 34 it helped. “We did Next Fest, which we’d been counting on, and it barely moved the needle.” Read the post
The big ones had help.The small ones found a room.
Past 10,000 wishlists, the biggest sources were YouTubers, festivals and Steam itself. Under 1,000, it was Next Fest, press and Reddit, each about as often as the other.
Past 10,000 wishlists · 32 said
Under 1,000 wishlists · 60 said
Steam personal calendar is definitely awesome and is the bulk of my latest wishlists!A developer at 10,000 wishlists. Read the post
Teams get further.Roughly one sale per 2.5 wishlists.
Solo developers had a median of 535 wishlists, teams 2,500. For the 54 released games that gave both numbers, the median was 0.39 copies sold for every wishlist at launch.
Median wishlists, solo developers (136 said).
Median wishlists, teams (75 said).
Copies sold per launch wishlist, at the median (54 games).
Median revenue, among the 45 who gave one.
How we did it.
A year of posts (1 Oct 2025 to 1 Oct 2026) from 6 game-dev subreddits. 2,094 posts, 619 with numbers. A model kept the 506 where a developer reported their own game’s numbers, from 394 people, one row each. A source only counts where the post says it, in a sentence we can point to. We checked samples by hand.
- Self-reported. People post when things move, and when they’re stuck.
- Drawn from Reddit, so Reddit is overrepresented.
- 238 of the 394 hadn’t launched yet.
- Shows what developers did, not what caused it.
Use the data. 394 rows, every one linked to its post.
No usernames. Free under CC BY 4.0, with a link back.
Most borrowed an audience.A festival, a channel, a room.
Kasspian finds the rooms where players ask for a game like yours, and what each one lets you post.
Find the rooms for your game