How many wishlists does Steam Next Fest bring?

In February 2026, a co-op game called How Many Dudes? went into Steam Next Fest with a demo it had launched during the Winter Sale. During the fest its store page was shown 645,745 times, opened 15,342 times, and earned 14,740 wishlists. Numbers like that are why Next Fest has a reputation as the event that makes indie games.

The obvious reading is that the fest delivers that kind of week to any game with a good demo. The data says otherwise. That game finished above the 95th percentile of the developers who answered How To Market A Game's survey, and the survey's median was 806. Across every demo in the fest, rather than the ones whose developers chose to answer, the median is lower still. Next Fest multiplies the demand a game already has; it rarely creates it.

Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game surveys developers after each Next Fest and publishes wishlists gained during the week by percentile. Four editions side by side:

A survey is filled in by developers who chose to answer, and those tend to be the ones who prepared and promoted. GameDiscoverCo measures every demo instead, through Steam followers, which are public for any game. Its numbers:

• Across the six editions to October 2025, the median demo ended the fest with about 18 followers, under 500 wishlists. The top 10% had about 173 followers (roughly 3,000 wishlists) and the top 5% about 390 (roughly 7,000).
• For February 2026 alone, GameDiscoverCo's estimate of the median demo is about 11 new followers, roughly 200 wishlists.
• In June 2026 a top-10% demo gained about 121 followers, which GameDiscoverCo put at probably 3,000 wishlists, and a top-1% demo about 1,330. Both were about 25% lower than in June 2025.

So the realistic expectation for an average entry is a few hundred wishlists, and 1,000 or more is a good result.

Part of the fall is arithmetic. GameDiscoverCo counted 4,382 demos in the June 2026 edition, up 66% from 2,645 in June 2025, while the top tiers each gained about a quarter fewer followers. Next Fest's audience grew too, but not as fast as the number of games splitting it.

Godot's share of those demos also rose, from 9.2% to 12.6% between the June 2025 and June 2026 editions, by GameDiscoverCo's count. The engine is no barrier; the crowd is.

Zukowski's reading of the survey is that the wishlists a game already has predict its fest result more closely than anything else, more closely than how fast it was gaining them in the two weeks before. That fits how the fest works: after the first shuffled days, Steam personalises its carousels from what players do during the event, so a demo players already want gets shown to more players like them.

Demo timing matters too. Of the ten games in the February 2026 survey that earned 15,000 or more wishlists during the fest, five had released their demo months before, four about a month before, and one dropped it a few days before. Zukowski found that demos released more than a month before the fest did much better than those released within the month, and called the last-minute drop too risky for most developers.

His own rough bands for what to expect: 1,000 wishlists or fewer for a game whose marketing is struggling; 2,000 to 3,000 for a solid game with decent streamer coverage; about 15,000 for a game in the lower half of the fest's top-100 chart; 30,000 to 45,000 for a breakout. Usually three to five games per edition reach 45,000 to 60,000.

1. Release the demo early, months before the fest if you can, and let it earn reviews, fixes and wishlists on its own.
2. Build wishlists before the fest, because the fest multiplies them. Creators, social clips, themed fests and your demo's own wishlist email all count.
3. Add pressure in the last two weeks. Zukowski's advice is to stack marketing in the weeks before the fest so the game arrives with momentum as well as a total.
4. Choose categories and tags that are true. Players browse the fest by genre and feature; the right shelf beats a crowded one.
5. Make the page convert. How Many Dudes? turned 15,342 visits into 14,740 wishlists, nearly one per visit. A capsule that reads at small sizes and a trailer that shows play in its first seconds decide that ratio.
6. Make it your last Next Fest before launch. A game gets one entry; Zukowski's advice is to spend it close to release, when the wishlists can turn into launch-week sales.

Wishlists are private to the developer, but followers are public. GameDiscoverCo's rule of thumb is that followers × 12 roughly approximates wishlists, and that during big promotions such as Next Fest the ratio runs nearer 15 to 20; its six-edition benchmarks above work out at roughly 17 or 18 wishlists per follower. Watching comparable games' followers before and after an edition is the cheapest way to see what the fest did for games like yours. Our wishlist estimator does that conversion for any Steam game.

Pre-fest wishlists predict the result, but they are not destiny. Ship Shaper went into February 2026 with about 5,000 wishlists, mostly from TikToks at its announcement, and gained 11,566 during the fest. A strong hook and a pick-up by the right creator can still outrun the model.

Downloads do not predict it either. Zukowski noticed player counts rising while the lower 70% of games stayed flat or fell, and suspects casual players drawn in by co-op demos play without wishlisting. And a high number in the week is not a sale: wishlists from a festival week convert like any other wishlist, which is to say a small share buy in launch week. Our wishlist-to-sales calculator shows the range.

Flockbay is a free AI game builder on the official Godot engine. Its Steam numbers read your game's followers and an estimated wishlist range, and your exact wishlists from your own Steamworks key, which never leaves your machine; they are free on every account. Its Steam page drafts the store copy and art your conversion depends on, Video studio cuts trailers and shorts from your real gameplay for the weeks before the fest, and playtest links get the demo played before strangers play it. Those publishing tools are free in beta until 1 December 2026.