How Steam's Most Wishlisted Indie Games Got There, and How to Copy Them

In 2020, a solo developer in Poland put up a trailer for a medieval city builder and guessed it might get 14k wishlists.

Four years later, Manor Lords was the most wishlisted game on Steam, ahead of Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades II.

Most games at the top of Steam's wishlist chart are sequels from studios with a hit behind them. A few aren't.

We looked at both to see what actually built their wishlists, and which of those moves you can still use after Steam's 2026 changes.

The short version: every one of them put something playable in front of people long before launch.

Steam doesn't publish wishlist counts. The only ranking it shows is the Top Wishlisted sort in Steam search, which lists unreleased games and mixes total wishlists with how fast they're growing. SteamDB mirrors that order.

So we counted a game if it reached the top 20 of that chart at some point, according to SteamDB or dated press coverage, and was made by an independent studio. We left out games that haven't launched yet (Light No Fire and Witchbrook are both high on the chart right now), because nobody can say yet whether their wishlists became sales. Hytale is out too, because it launched on its own launcher instead of Steam.

Wishlist counts come from the developer where they've shared one, and are labelled as estimates where they come from analysts.

Source: PC Gamer, GamesRadar, PCGamesN, GameDiscoverCo, Alinea Analytics, SteamDB and Mega Crit. Estimates are labelled.

Greg Styczeń announced Manor Lords in 2020 and guessed it would get 14k wishlists. Four years later it launched with 3.2 million.

GameDiscoverCo puts the late-2022 "mega-bump" down to the Next Fest demo. Nine days before launch, Styczeń posted a plain note on what the game wasn't, which Hooded Horse's CEO calls "a very protective type of marketing".

Tiny Glade's developers posted work-in-progress clips on X a year before there was anything to wishlist, and sent the attention to a mailing list. When the Steam page went live, 28% of that list clicked through. Most social posts get 1% or less. Tiny Glade launched in September 2024 with over 1.3M wishlists, and sold 616k copies in less than a month (GameDiscoverCo).

Silksong, Hades II and Slay the Spire 2 all reached the top of the chart. Most of that came from the first game, which you can't copy.

A few habits are worth taking anyway.

Team Cherry barely marketed it. Fans put it back at #1 in August 2024 and kept it there until launch, with a running joke about the wait.

79% of the people who played at launch already owned Hollow Knight. The studio posted rarely and announced the release date only two weeks out. Silksong peaked at about 587k concurrent players on Steam in September 2025.

Supergiant revealed it at The Game Awards in December 2022, ran a closed technical test in April 2024, then launched in Early Access that May. It spent about 16 months updating the game from player feedback before 1.0 in September 2025. You won't get The Game Awards stage or a Nintendo deal. You can run Early Access and a closed test.

Mega Crit says it passed a million wishlists in December 2024, before it had shown any gameplay. That's the clearest sign on the list that an existing audience, not marketing, did the work.

Can you copy them? Partly. A quiet, honest update channel and a playable test before launch, yes. A famous first game, no.

Parcel Simulator never came near the top 20, but if you're a small team, it's the closest match to you. Dan, who works alone in the UK as Dansan Digital, spent almost two years taking it to festivals and got to about 7k wishlists.

Then he put a demo into Next Fest in February 2025. He hoped for 1,500 wishlists from the fest and got about 10k. It launched that June with 42k.

Launch brought a second creator. Dan emailed Let's Game It Out twice, and its Parcel Simulator video passed 2.3 million views (How To Market A Game).

1. Something playable, early. A Next Fest demo (Manor Lords, Tiny Glade, Parcel Simulator), a closed test and Early Access (Hades II), playtests in the final weeks (Manor Lords).
2. A channel you own. A mailing list (Tiny Glade) that reaches people without going through Steam.
3. Plain expectations. Manor Lords said what it wasn't. Team Cherry stayed quiet instead of hyping.
4. A late push. Manor Lords got a quarter of its wishlists in the last two weeks. Video Game Insights found successful games collect over 70% of their wishlists in the last four months (via GameDev Reports, July 2025).
5. Creators and streams.

• Parcel Simulator: a Real Civil Engineer video brought about 7k wishlists, by the developer's estimate
• Manor Lords: its final two weeks ran on demos, playtests and streams
• Tiny Glade: its launch spread through builders sharing their creations, from Sims streamers to a Helm's Deep build (GameDiscoverCo)
• The Riftbreaker: EXOR streamed development builds twice a week, and an early build sent to creators it met at trade shows added about 12k wishlists in two weeks (GameDiscoverCo)
• Devlogs: a regular build diary, like Ink Stains Games' Stoneshard devlogs on Steam, Watt's Isle Goblin devlogs on YouTube or Throne of Valoria's on TikTok
• You can also stream your own game or demo to your Steam store page

These games built their wishlists under the old rules. Two things changed in June 2026.

Popular Upcoming, the list on Steam's front page, now needs around 100k wishlists, up from about 7k, by Chris Zukowski's estimate. You probably won't get there, and that's fine.

In its place, Steam added a Personal Calendar that shows each player upcoming games picked for them. Zukowski estimates you need somewhere between 8k and 30k wishlists to start appearing, and that it sends 300 to 3,000 wishlists a day once you do. Valve hasn't published a threshold, so treat those as rough.

The calendar only shows games with a date, so set your release date about two months out, don't shadow-drop, and make your genre obvious from your capsule and tags.

Steam's July 2026 wishlist redesign also highlights wishlisted games that have a demo, and lets players ask to be told when one lands. That makes a wishlist you collect before your demo worth more than it was.

Next Fest is more crowded, so you'll need more going in. February 2026 had over 3,500 demos, and the median game picked up about 200 wishlists.

What hasn't changed is the email. Steam emails everyone with your game on their wishlist when it launches, and again for a discount of 20% or more that runs longer than 8 hours. Only players with a verified email get it, and Steam won't email anyone it emailed about your game in the past two weeks.

• Post short clips, and send people to a pre-launch mailing list until your Steam page exists
• Put up your Steam page with a trailer once the game looks like itself
• Post clips to genre and fan subreddits from an account with a real history, and read each subreddit's self-promotion rules first
• If a clip does well, re-cut it and post it again

Reddit is a lottery with a small ticket price.

Laysara's 30-second trailer on r/gaming earned over 11,000 wishlists in a day in December 2021, from a base of about 1,800. Most clip posts earn far less, so don't plan around a hit.

Reddit ads are a different story: Danchi Days paid about $1.80 a wishlist, and after launch its developer added that those wishlists converted "much lower" than the rest.

Re-posting works on short video too. The Matriarch had under 500 wishlists until a faster-cut TikTok trailer reached about a million views overnight, and it climbed to about 23,000 (Game Developer, April 2022). Mortal Rite's developer reported over 60k wishlists alongside 120M TikTok views, but reckoned only about one viewer in 2,000 wishlisted (GameDiscoverCo, August 2022). Gleam's Follow on TikTok and View on TikTok Actions can send TikTok giveaway entrants to your clips.

• Build a demo that ends on a reason to wishlist
• Arrive with as many wishlists as you can
• Send Steam's demo notification to your wishlisters and followers
• Refresh the demo with something new before your next event, rather than re-running the same one

Your starting count matters more than anything you'll do during the fest. In How To Market A Game's Next Fest survey, games that came in with 10k to 100k wishlists gained about five times as many as games with 1k to 10k.

The demo notification is free and easy to miss. Steam lets you send one per demo, within two weeks of it going live, and CleanFall went from 1,800 to about 6,000 wishlists in a few days after its demo launched.

If you want a benchmark, the median demo at June 2026's Next Fest turned about 19% of its players into wishlists, Zukowski found.

• Set your release date, so the Personal Calendar can show your game
• Run a playtest and send keys to creators
• Post what your game is and isn't
• Email your list as soon as the date is set
• Avoid a December launch, when the Winter Sale buries new releases

• Email your list on launch day, whatever Steam sends
• Run your first discount at 20% or more, for longer than 8 hours, on your cheapest package too. Because of the two-week rule, a launch-week discount won't get an email of its own

Planet Centauri spent over 10 years in Early Access, sold over 100,000 copies there and collected over 130,000 wishlists (PC Gamer, September 2025). Permadeath launched 1.0 on December 13, 2024 and sold 581 copies in five days.

Nine months later, Valve told the studio why. A bug had stopped the wishlist launch email, one that hit fewer than 100 releases since 2015. Valve offered a Daily Deal to make up for the lost visibility. The studio said it had already started a new game, because it couldn't afford to keep patching this one.

You can't rely on one platform's email. Build a mailing list you own, plus a Discord server and socials you can reach directly, and email them yourself on launch day. A Capture form or the Subscribe Action builds that list, and the Join a Discord Server and follow Actions grow the rest.

Big numbers aren't a promise either, and you shouldn't treat yours as one. Generation Exile had over 35k wishlists and a top-70 Next Fest demo, and sold under 300 copies in its first week.

Your game itself matters most. GameDiscoverCo found that the game itself explains more than where the wishlists came from.

Valve watches conversion too: it held back a launch feature for Tape To Tape until it could see the game's wishlists turning into sales.

Age matters too.

Wishlists added years before launch convert worse than recent ones, and on CyberCorp the oldest converted at about 2% and the newest at about 8%.

And wishlists aren't the only route. PEAK sold over a million copies in its first week from fewer than 37k wishlists, on the back of a launch that spread through streamers.

If you want your own benchmark, GameDiscoverCo found that games launched in 2024 and 2025 with over 25k wishlists sold a median of 0.15 copies per wishlist in their first week. Track where your wishlists come from with Steam's UTM links, and compare your Steamworks wishlist report in the weeks around each big moment.

If a giveaway fits your plan, our Steam template has Wishlist on Steam, Play a Game and Join a Group set up already. Copy it and point the Steam Actions at your game.

Or start from a launch giveaway. Here's a live demo built around Witchbrook (a Gleam demo, not run by Chucklefish). It has Wishlist on Steam, Follow on TikTok, an email signup and Viral Share set up already.