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Steam Next Fest hard truths... It's becoming less useful. There were over 4,300 demos this time by our count, so standing out is hard – and harder than it’s ever been. And the metric developers are chasing hardest, wishlists, are sliding into vanity-metric territory. A wishlist is not an indicator of launch sales. It never really was, but it’s getting more obvious. We looked at the top games from the June 2025 Next Fest and tracked how many of their wishlisters actually became buyers once the games launched (as per our estimates): - Dispatch, one of the better converters, turned about 25% of its June 2025 wishlisters into buyers within three months. It’s still sitting on the other 75%. - No, I’m Not a Human converted around 15% of its 189K wishlisters three months post-launch. - Jump Space managed about 10%. - Dead as Disco converted roughly 5% within 30 days (it came out last month) - Ball X Pit hit about 26% at 90 days, near the top of the range. - Pioner converted around 1%, sunk by heavy technical and optimisation problems at launch. So even the strong performers leave the large majority of their wishlists unconverted, and most of those people won’t buy until a heavy discount lands much later, if at all. Again, the lesson is the uncomfortable one, but one worth saying. Being a top Next Fest game undeniably helps visibility, but it’s the games that became the zeitgeist on the strength of their quality, and the marketing around them, that actually got bought. None of this is to take the wind out of the event’s sails. It’s always a highlight of my quarter (or my third, I guess?) But its discoverability problem is really a microcosm of gaming’s, and Steam’s, discoverability problem at large. Next Fest is becoming a tick-box exercise that only pays off for the absolute upper tier. For some devs, it might genuinely be smarter to drop a demo outside the event window and own your own spotlight rather than fight 4,300 others for the algorithm’s attention. We analysts often get obsessed with these kinda of events, but the impact is modest even for the biggest games, and minimal for anything outside the top 25 (hell, top 10). Some games will benefit. Most won’t. My advice would be to stop putting so much weight on wishlists and watch two things instead: demo playtime and demo-to-wishlist attachment rate. Both measure whether people who tried the game actually liked it enough to come back, which is a far better predictor of launch conversion than a wishlist count that mostly captures idle curiosity. More on Subtack (Link in bio!)