You launch with wishlists at a price of $ as . Based on how other Steam games converted their wishlists, this is the range of sales you can expect.
| Period | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 375 $1,658 | 1,350 $5,970 | 3,750 $16,583 |
| Month 1 | 450 $1,990 | 1,875 $8,291 | 4,875 $21,557 |
| Year 1 | 900 $3,980 | 3,750 $16,583 | 9,750 $43,115 |
Copies sold since launch, with net revenue below. Totals are cumulative, so year 1 includes week 1 and month 1.
Steamworks reports the share of your wishlisters who bought, which is usually 5–13%. The number that predicts sales is different: all sales divided by your wishlists at launch. It counts buyers who never wishlisted, so it runs several times higher. This calculator uses the second one.
The rule comes from Jake Birkett's 2018 data, where the median was 0.36. GameDiscoverCo's recent surveys put the week-1 median at 0.15–0.22, and about 0.10 for games over $10.
GameDiscoverCo finds outcomes vary 10–20x around the median. In the launches we collected, week-1 sales ran from 0.02 to 1.19 copies per wishlist. Treat the typical figure as the middle of a wide range, not a forecast.
Month 1 is usually 1.25–1.5x week 1. By the end of the first year a game has sold about 2.5x its launch-week units, mostly through sales and discounts. The first week tells you which part of the range you are in.
Wishlists are the best single predictor of launch sales, but these push a game toward the low or high end.
Developers who shared both their wishlists at launch and their sales. The periods differ, so compare each one with the matching row above.
| Game | Wishlists | Sales | Period | Per wishlist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiny Glade | 1,300,000 | 616,000 | Month 1 | 0.47 |
| shapez 2Early Access | 330,000 | 260,000 | 3 weeks | 0.79 |
| Urban Jungle | 120,000 | 13,000 | Week 1 | 0.11 |
| Hundred Days | 60,000 | 9,700 | Week 1 | 0.16 |
| Mind Over Magnet | 50,000 | 10,000 | Week 1 | 0.20 |
| Parcel Simulator | 42,000 | 50,000 | 2 weeks | 1.19 |
| Unnamed Metroidvania | 20,000 | 600 | Week 1 | 0.03 |
| WarriOrbHad a free prologue | 16,000 | 357 | 3 days | 0.02 |
| ExtraneumEarly Access, then 1.0 | 10,000 | 2,400 | Year 1 | 0.24 |
| Gravity Storm | 700 | 47 | Week 1 | 0.07 |
| Rose Seed Replica | 268 | 130 | Week 1 | 0.49 |
| Dream Warrior | 167 | 107 | Year 1 | 0.64 |
The calculator multiplies your wishlists by a sales-per-wishlist ratio for each period. The ratios are our own estimates, drawn from GameDiscoverCo's surveys of hundreds of launches, Jake Birkett's data and the developer postmortems above.
| Sales per wishlist | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | 0.05 | 0.18 | 0.50 |
| Month 1 | 0.06 | 0.25 | 0.65 |
| Year 1 | 0.12 | 0.50 | 1.30 |
Games priced at $10 or more get 0.75x these ratios, and Early Access games get 0.7x. Revenue is copies times price, run through the same breakdown as the revenue calculator.
Sources: GameDiscoverCo, the state of Steam wishlist conversions; GameDiscoverCo, wishlist survey of 100+ games; Game Developer, wishlists to first-week sales; Jake Birkett, how many wishlists should you have.