The Mechanisms That Decide Who Gets Found

The Wishlist Funnel Has Degraded

Steam wishlist-to-purchase conversion sits closer to 5 to 10% in 2026. A 2018 baseline of roughly 20% circulates widely in industry writing, but no primary source for it has surfaced; treat the direction of the compression as solid and its magnitude as indicative rather than measured.

GameDiscoverCo's analysis of Steam launches between September 2024 and September 2025 found that the median conversion rate for titles with over 25,000 wishlists at launch sat at approximately 0.15x, roughly 15,000 first-week sales per 100,000 wishlists. For titles priced above $10, that drops to 0.10x.

Top performers in the GameDiscoverCo study

Source: GameDiscoverCo

The study found no evidence that wishlist-to-sales ratios have declined since 2022 for titles above the 25,000-wishlist threshold. The overall average has fallen because supply growth means most games never accumulate a meaningful wishlist base in the first place. What has changed is competition for wishlists as release volume has grown. Titles that underperformed had an average 411 days of pre-release Steam presence GameDiscoverCo. Those that exceeded expectations averaged 214 days.

Valve's June 2026 changes

The Popular Upcoming tab threshold was raised from roughly 7,000 to approximately 100,000 wishlists How To Market A Game. A new Personal Calendar feature has an entry point of 8,000 to 30,000 wishlists, offering up to a two-month exposure window.

Click-through rates tell the story: Personal Calendar sits at 31 to 34%, versus Popular Upcoming's 0.81 to 1.56%. The implication is fewer impressions but dramatically higher-quality visits, a structure that rewards studios that arrive with a pre-activated audience rather than ones hoping the algorithm builds one for them.

Early Access Is a Marketing Event, Not a Development Vehicle

GameDiscoverCo's 2025 analysis of 225 Early Access graduates found that only 20% earned more in their first 30 days at 1.0 than in their first month of Early Access.

Median 1.0 launch month revenue sat at approximately 40% of median first-month Early Access revenue. Median EA duration was 437 days (about 14 months); average duration ran to 643 days (about 21 months). Steam's discovery algorithm does not treat 1.0 as a second launch. The Early Access debut is the visibility event, and everything that follows is a slower, quieter tail.

Historical anchors

Source: Game Developer

33 Immortals ran a 15-month Early Access period exclusively on Epic Games Store and Xbox Game Pass before opening on Steam at 1.0 on June 9, 2026 TechTimes. The rationale: a 33-player co-op game requires a minimum viable player base to fill sessions before entering the platform where discovery costs the most.

The Attention Economy Has Decided

Roblox accounted for 67% of net global gaming industry growth outside China in 2025. Daily active users exceeded 150 million, up 69% versus 2024. Roblox logged over 10 billion hours of play each month in 2025, monthly engagement that exceeded Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined.

The co-op structural advantage

Top 5 Steam titles by copies sold, H1 2025 (all co-op)

Breakout case studies

R.E.P.O. Cooperative horror, an estimated ~$147M gross revenue in 2025 (Alinea Analytics shows $113.6M gross as of May 2025; Sensor Tower tracks $140.1M lifetime; $147M reflects a year-end extrapolation). The table above shows 16.4M copies sold through H1 2025; 19.6M is total players reached by year-end, a broader count. The failure states become the content: losing in R.E.P.O. generates shareable clips more reliably than winning.

Schedule I. Solo developer, $15, no marketing budget: 9M copies (H1 2025), roughly $125 to $151M revenue. Viral entirely through TikTok and streamer content.

Peak. Co-op climbing game: 100,000 copies in the first 24 hours, 5M in the first month, 10M by August 2025.

Megabonk. A $9.99 solo developer title that hit a peak of 117,336 concurrent players, surpassing Hades 2's all-time record, with 1.3M copies sold in the first two weeks.

Slay the Spire 2 (March 2026). 4.6M copies in the first two weeks, $92M gross revenue by day 14 Alinea Analytics. Recognizing Patterns confirmed a 31% wishlist-to-sales conversion rate in launch week, against the 7 to 10% considered successful industry-wide.

The Power Law Is the Operating Environment

Game Oracle's analysis of 62,466 Steam developers found that 5% of games account for approximately 91.9% of all Steam sales. The distribution is not a bell curve with a long tail. It is closer to a cliff.

The probability of a breakthrough hit, defined as 25,000 copies sold, on a first release sits at roughly 1 in 10. By the fifth release, that approaches 1 in 2. The odds do not stay flat. They compound with shipping experience, which is exactly the resource most first-time founders have the least of.

Only 1 in 5 developers ever release a second game on Steam, meaning 80% of annual supply comes from developers who will not ship again. The cumulative probability of both surviving to five releases and achieving a hit sits at approximately 13.7%. Survivorship bias is the mechanism generating the outlier case studies in this report, not a confound to explain away.