Very happy that Captain Disaster and the Two Worlds of Riskara has reached a thousand wishlists on Steam. Obviously this is nowhere near our final target but it's an extremely important milestone along the way.
Reaching 1,000 wishlists felt like a worthwhile milestone, even if it was never going to put Stomping Boots into blockbuster territory. There is no single official definition of what counts as “good” for a small indie game, and Valve itself says there is no minimum wishlist number required before a game starts being shown to users. Even so, wishlists do matter: Steam notes that they can affect placement in areas such as Popular Upcoming, and wishlisters can receive notifications when a game launches or goes on sale. Current market analysis also suggests that the majority of Steam releases still launch with under 10,000 wishlists, so 1,000 is at least evidence of genuine pre-release interest rather than just background noise.
The often-repeated figure of around 7,000 wishlists is best understood as industry rule-of-thumb rather than an official Steam requirement. In indie marketing circles, that sort of number is commonly cited as the point where a game has a realistic chance of appearing in Popular Upcoming, which in turn can help create the stronger launch burst Steam tends to reward. Valve does not publish a formal threshold, though, so it is safer to think of 7,000 not as a magic pass mark, but as one widely discussed benchmark for giving a small commercial indie a better shot at visibility.
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