How to Get More Steam Wishlists with Influencers

Where do Steam wishlists actually come from?

Mostly from other people talking about your game, not from your own posts. In June 2026, Kirill Oreshkin, head of Polden Publishing, shared a rough breakdown of where wishlists come from for the indie games they work with. (WN Hub)

That’s one publisher’s view, not a law of nature, but the shape is telling. Creators directly drive close to half of the wishlists, and a good chunk of the “algorithm” and “friends” slices exist because creators got the ball rolling. Steam tends to show more people games that are already getting attention.

Notice the gap between the two creator rows, too. Short-form video brings the biggest number of wishlists. Streamers and YouTubers bring fewer, but Oreshkin points out that their audiences are more likely to buy. You need both.

Spotting which part of your game will make a great 40-second clip, and which creators will make it, is half the battle. INFLUENCE handpicks creators whose recent short-form and long-form videos are actually landing in your genre, so the people talking about your game are the ones whose audiences wishlist games like it.

Are wishlists still worth chasing in 2026?

Yes, but each one is worth less than it used to be, so you need more of them and you need better ones.

In October 2026, game marketing consultant Chris Zukowski analyzed Steamworks data from developers and found that first-month sales per wishlist roughly halved, from 0.45 copies for games released in 2020–2022 to 0.22 for games released in 2023–2025. (InvenGlobal) He points to a few likely causes:

• Hover-to-wishlist. Players can wishlist a game without even opening its store page, so a wishlist is often more like a bookmark.

• More festivals. Events like Steam Next Fest bring lots of wishlists, but festival wishlists tend to convert less often.

• Everyone’s doing it. More studios now know the basics, so there are more wishlists across the whole market.

Here’s the good news in the same analysis: wishlist count is still the best predictor of launch sales. The correlation between launch-day wishlists and first-month sales barely moved. More wishlists still means more sales. It just takes more of them to get the same result.

That changes how you should think about creators. A video that brings 2,000 wishlists from people who watched someone play your game for 20 minutes is worth more than 5,000 hover-clicks from a meme clip. Both are useful. They’re just not equal.

Balancing volume against quality is a budgeting problem as much as a creative one. INFLUENCE composes your campaign across short-form creators for reach and long-form creators for intent, and shows views by creator in one place, so you can see which mix is actually filling your wishlist chart.

Which creators bring wishlists that turn into sales?

The ones whose audiences already play games like yours, in formats that show real gameplay for longer than a few seconds.

A few patterns hold up across genres:

• Mid-size beats huge for wishlists. A 150,000-subscriber channel that only covers roguelikes usually does more for a roguelike than a 5-million-subscriber variety channel.

• “Games to watch” lists work. Many YouTubers make roundups of upcoming games. Being one of eight games in a roundup can bring steady wishlists for months.

• Demos turn viewers into players. When a creator plays your demo, some viewers download it themselves, and players who’ve tried a demo are a strong kind of wishlist.

Finding those mid-size genre specialists takes a lot of scrolling, and they’re the ones most likely to be booked up before a big festival. INFLUENCE does the searching and the booking, sends each creator a brief built around how they normally cover games, and handles the negotiating and payouts, so your team can stay focused on the demo itself.

How to time creators around Steam Next Fest, demos and playtests

Line creators up to post during and right before the moments Steam is already promoting your game. That way, creator attention and Steam’s own visibility stack on top of each other.

The numbers on festivals are hard to ignore. When Valve shared data on the summer 2020 Steam Next Fest, the median game’s daily wishlist additions were 421% higher during the festival than in the two weeks before, and stayed about 15% higher in the three weeks after. (Game Developer, via GameDiscoverCo) That data is a few years old, and festivals are more crowded now, but the lesson still holds: festivals are when players are actively hunting for games to try.

A simple plan around Next Fest:

1. Two to three weeks before: send creators your demo with a clear date when they can post.

2. Festival week: have the bulk of creator videos go live, ideally spread across the week, not all on day one.

3. The week after: a smaller wave from creators who couldn’t make the festival, while the “Next Fest favorites” roundups are coming out.

The same pattern works for your announcement, a playtest or a major demo update. Anything that gives players something to do right now is a good moment for creators.

Festivals come with hard deadlines, and missing one by a week means waiting months for the next. INFLUENCE books creators ahead of the date, makes sure they have the demo and the posting window in their brief, and spreads their posts across the week, so you get a full festival instead of one loud morning.

How to track which creator drove which wishlists

Give each creator their own tagged link to your Steam page, and watch your daily wishlist numbers alongside each creator’s posting date. Neither method is perfect on its own, but together they tell you a lot.

• Tagged links. Steam supports UTM-tagged store links, so in Steamworks you can see how much traffic each creator’s link sent. Give every creator a different one.

• Daily wishlist spikes. Most players won’t click a link. They’ll see a video, then search Steam later. Line up your daily wishlist chart with the days each creator posted, and the bumps usually tell the story.

• Ask in your Discord. If you have a community, a simple “how did you hear about us?” poll is surprisingly useful.

Then judge creators on more than one number. Views tell you how many people saw the game. Link traffic and wishlist spikes tell you who acted on it. A creator with fewer views but a sharp wishlist bump is often your best pick for launch week.

Matching posts to wishlist bumps is tedious when the data lives in three different places. INFLUENCE tracks every creator’s delivered views and posting dates on one dashboard, so you can lay your Steamworks numbers next to it and see quickly which creators are worth bringing back.

Mistakes that waste wishlist budget

Most wasted wishlist budget comes from small, fixable things on your side, not from the creators.

• No Steam link in the video or description. Every creator should have a clear “wishlist on Steam” mention and a link. Say it once, naturally.

• A store page that doesn’t match the video. If a creator shows tense, dark combat and your Steam page opens with a bright cartoony capsule, people bounce.

• A trailer instead of gameplay. Creators work best when they play. Sending a trailer to react to wastes the main reason creators sell games.

• Everything on one day. Clustering all creators on the same morning makes them compete with each other.

• Buying wishlists. Bot or incentivized wishlists won’t buy your game, and they muddy the data you need to plan your launch.

These are the details that slip when a small team is juggling a demo, a festival and 30 creators at once. INFLUENCE checks every draft against your brief before it goes live, including the game name, the Steam mention and the link, so the views you pay for actually point people to your page. And with pay-per-view pricing, you set the max CPM and budget and only pay for views your videos receive (here’s how that works).

Wishlists are harder to earn than they used to be, but they’re still the best signal you’ve got before launch. The studios that collect them well put real gameplay in front of the right creators at the moments Steam is already watching. If you’d rather not run all that yourself, that’s the work we built INFLUENCE to take on.