{"id":113037,"date":"2020-05-15T17:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T17:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/363074"},"modified":"2020-05-15T17:20:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-15T17:20:00","slug":"blog-steams-wishlist-to-sales-thoughts-a-call-for-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/05\/15\/blog-steams-wishlist-to-sales-thoughts-a-call-for-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Steam’s wishlist-to-sales %: thoughts & a call for data!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. <\/small><\/i><\/strong> <\/p>\n

\n

[Hi, I\u2019m Simon Carless<\/a>, and you\u2019re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter<\/a>, a regular look at how people find – and buy – your video games. Or don\u2019t.]<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

After the last – slightly lighter, fluffier – newsletter, we\u2019re back to hard data land. And I\u2019m focusing on a subject that\u2019s important and beloved (?) to many:<\/p>\n

\u2018If you have X wishlists at Steam launch, how many copies of your game will you sell?\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Partly, this newsletter has been prompted by my realization that the quality of Steam wishlists vary more wildly than I ever presumed. (I thought there were \u2018slightly bad\u2019 and \u2018slightly good\u2019 wishlists. But now I think there\u2019s \u2018very bad and \u2018very good\u2019 ones.)<\/p>\n

So, the sometimes cited – & correctly calculated by Jake Birkett<\/a> – \u20180.5-ish average sales per wishlist in first week\u2019 <\/strong>isn\u2019t wrong, as such. It\u2019s just\u2026 part of a way wider range than many folks think.<\/p>\n

More (Anecdotal) Data On Wishlist Outliers<\/h2>\n

Specifically, since I sent out the last newsletter, I\u2019ve been chatting to someone whose game launched in mid 2019 with almost 20,000 wishlists. However, this game did something similar to the much-discussed WarriOrb<\/a>, and limped along to around 600 units by the end of the first week (that\u2019s just 0.03 sales per wishlist<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

The game doesn\u2019t look bad to me, per se – it\u2019s a pixel-y retro Metroidvania with a publisher. It\u2019s perhaps not a game I would have expected to have 20,000 wishlists at launch, based on my personal experience. (And actually, WarriOrb wasn\u2019t either.)<\/p>\n

One thing the dev suggested, based on his comparisons with friends who had better – or similar – wishlist to sales ratios, is simply this.<\/p>\n

If almost all of your wishlists are generated internally via Steam<\/strong>, it\u2019s because you\u2019ve had a Steam page for a long time, or you got in an \u2018upcoming games\u2019 feature. Those wishlists may be much lower-converting<\/strong>, especially if your off-Steam visibility (community, streamers, etc) is negligible.<\/p>\n

But if you have good wishlist numbers and an interested community, streamers already enthusiastic about the game<\/strong> ahead of launch, and press ready to go, then many of your wishlists may be much higher quality<\/strong> – from people genuinely enthused about the game.<\/p>\n

You Don\u2019t See What You Can\u2019t See?<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Part of the reason I was confused about this was that most of the data I\u2019d seen was from indie publisher No More Robots<\/a>, which I help out with. And that data has been showing numbers that were – well, way higher.<\/p>\n

Of the games NMR has released onto Steam that weren\u2019t Early Access from 2018 to 2020, we\u2019ve had the following results, in randomized order:<\/p>\n

Game A<\/strong>: 0.55x sales per wishlist (in first week)
Game B<\/strong>: 0.72x sales per wishlist (in first week)
Game C<\/strong>: 1.19x sales per wishlist (in first week)
Game D<\/strong>: 0.76x sales per wishlist (in first week)<\/p>\n

For context, three of these games launched on Steam between 8,000 and 20,000 wishlists. And one of them launched with towards 80,000 wishlists, as NMR supremo Mike Rose revealed on Twitter<\/a> a little while back.<\/p>\n

(Sorry to be a little coy, just for anonymity reasons. Oh, and when discussing this, I always use \u2018Wishlist Balance\u2019, not \u2018Wishlist Additions\u2019 as the real number. I presume y\u2019all are too. And \u2018at launch\u2019 means the day before launch, since wishlists shoot up as soon as the game goes on sale.)<\/p>\n

The Answer Was Already In The Data<\/h2>\n

Now, I freely admit that No More Robots titles are carefully picked to be streamer-friendly, have more established communities, and very robustly promoted by the whole team. So their \u2018sales per wishlist\u2019 number was always going to be on the high side.<\/p>\n

And, an additional complication – this semi-mythical \u2018sales per wishlist\u2019 number, as noted in Jake\u2019s original article<\/a>, is a compilation of two separate stats – \u2018wishlist conversion % in week 1\u2019 and \u2018organic sales added in week one\u2019. So it\u2019s possible one of those could be amazing and the other one lousy.<\/p>\n

But overall, if you look at Jake\u2019s original graph of the 14 games he got data for, for \u2018sales per wishlist\u2019, you\u2019ll see a much bigger range than I previously remembered:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Even though the average is 0.58 sales per wishlist and the median is 0.36<\/strong>, as Jake explicitly notes, the range is from 0.14 sales to 1.8 sales<\/strong>. And six of the fourteen surveyed games are 0.2 sales per wishlist or less<\/strong>, looking at the graph!<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a biiig range. Jake\u2019s survey also noted that wishlist conversion %<\/strong> on its own in first week – without organic sales added in<\/strong> – varied between 2% and 32%<\/strong>. That\u2019s another huge range. And things may have changed further since 2018, with thousands more games on Steam.<\/p>\n

The Question is – what are your first-week stats?<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

So, here comes the ask. I\u2019d like to put together an updated 2020 version of the \u20181-week sales per wishlist\u2019 data<\/strong>, completely anonymously, using readers of this newsletter.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve set up a short, completely anonymous questionnaire for you to fill in<\/a> <\/strong>if you\u2019ve released a game on Steam. <\/strong>Please complete it<\/a> some time before Friday, May 22nd. <\/strong>I don\u2019t mind if your game sold 500 copies or 500,000 in its first week, we\u2019re just looking for more data here.<\/p>\n

There are obviously more variables than we can possibly imagine. And things like \u2018being in a hot genre\u2019 or \u2018massive YouTubers picking you up after release\u2019 can\u2019t be easily encapsulated in a short survey. (We\u2019ll talk about \u2018one year revenue is 4-5x one week revenue\u2019 at another juncture!)<\/p>\n

But I feel confident that we can get some useful, current data. And I\u2019ll obviously share all of it with the readers of this newsletter as soon as I get it and numbercrunch it. Thanks in advance! (You can fill it in<\/a><\/strong> once for each game, if you have multiple games to share data on.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u0092s community.The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. [Hi, I\u2019m Simon Carless, and you\u2019re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, a regular look at how people find – and buy – your video games. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}