How to Sustain Wishlist Growth After NextFest and Boost Your Game’s Success

NextFest is what many game developers consider a premier event for showcasing their games, as it often generates thousands of wishlists that can later convert into sales. But the party doesn’t have to end with your wishlist growth during NextFest—this event also provides an excellent opportunity to springboard your growth even further.

The problem many indie games face is that their wishlist growth often follows a familiar pattern:

For many Indies, wishlist growth before NextFest is relatively flat or nearly non-existent, then there is a huge spike during the event. Afterward, wishlist growth often flatlines once again.

Maintaining steady wishlist growth—rather than just relying on that brief spike—can help de-risk your launch to be more successful. It also makes you look more appealing to publishers. If you haven’t read it already, here’s our article on How to Analyze your NextFest results.

At Glitch, we do data-driven game marketing, guiding developers in analyzing data to make the best decisions for their go-to-market strategy. This article will cover how to create consistent wishlist growth all the way until your game is launched, even after major events like NextFest.

Advertising

Advertising is a promotional tactic that indie developers must handle carefully because it can easily become costly if not executed properly. Advertising typically isn’t done continuously but happens at specific marketing “beats” or key milestones. For Indies, there are two scenarios where you should strongly consider advertising:

1. When the return on investment (ROI) for advertising your game is significantly greater than the costs
   (For example, your game costs $20, and it costs you $10 to acquire one user who will almost certainly purchase.)
2. When advertising will augment certain milestones that increase your game’s chances of success

For this article, we are focusing on the second point because it relates closely to NextFest. On platforms like Steam, your game can be featured in:

• New & Trending: Highlights recent releases garnering significant attention. Eligibility is typically determined shortly after a game's release and is region-specific.
• Popular Upcoming: Showcases soon-to-be-released games that are attracting significant attention. A crucial metric for this section is “wishlist velocity,” or the rate at which users add your game to their wishlists in the weeks leading up to launch.
• Daily Deals: Curated promotions where selected games receive prominent placement on the Steam homepage and relevant genre or tag pages for a limited time, typically between 7 to 14 days.
• Most Played: Highlights games with the highest concurrent player counts. This ranking is purely data-driven, based on real-time player activity. To be featured here, your game needs a significant number of concurrent players, often in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

As an indie developer, the targets that likely matter most to you are New & Trending or Popular Upcoming. So, let’s say after NextFest you’re at 8,000 wishlists, and you want an extra 2,000 to reach 10,000 wishlists and make the Popular Upcoming list. Popular Upcoming can easily boost your game by another 5,000 wishlists.

While this strategy is not guaranteed, you want to think of it as a calculated risk. Here are some considerations:

• Cost Per Wishlist (CPW) is calculated by the total cost of your ads divided by the total new wishlist additions.
• A typical CPW for indie games often ranges between $1 to $3.
• You can choose CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) campaigns. Most developers prefer CPC because it can be more direct and trackable.

For example, if you spend $100 and you get 66 wishlists, then:

CPW = $100 / 66 ≈ $1.50 per wishlist

Let’s say you have 7,000 wishlists now and need 3,000 more to reach 10,000 for Popular Upcoming status. It would cost $4,500 to reach that goal at a $1.50 CPW. Is it worth it?

Example Calculation if Your Game Is Priced at $10

• You expect a 10% conversion rate.
• If your game then gets picked up by Steam’s algorithm, let’s assume you gain another 5,000 wishlists, bringing your total to 15,000.
• At a 10% conversion rate, you’re looking at 1,500 sales.
• $10 × 1,500 = $15,000.
• Steam takes 30% ($4,500), leaving $10,500.
• Factor in a 10% return rate, leaving about $9,450.
• After subtracting your $4,500 ad spend, you net $4,950.

Without advertising:

• 7,000 wishlists at a 10% conversion rate = 700 sales.
• 700 × $10 = $7,000.
• Steam takes 30% ($2,100), leaving $4,900.
• After a 10% return rate, around $4,410 remains.

When you compare the two, you might see only a small difference for a $10 game. If you net $4,950 after the ad push vs. $4,410 without it, you’re making just $540 more, which might not be worth the added risk.

Example Calculation if Your Game Is Priced at $20

• Let’s assume you reach 15,000 wishlists (an initial 10,000 plus 5,000 extra, thanks to Steam’s algorithm).
• At a 10% conversion rate, you sell 1,500 copies.
• Revenue: $20 × 1,500 = $30,000.
• Steam takes 30% ($9,000), leaving $21,000.
• After a 10% refund rate, you have $18,900.
• Subtract the $4,500 ad spend, and you net $14,400.

Here, the difference of a higher game price (from $10 to $20) can translate to around $10,000 more in overall profit. Hopefully, this illustrates how a major factor in deciding if the advertising risk is worth taking is the price point of your game. Your entire strategy must be mapped out to decide if this is a calculated risk that aligns with your goals.

Organic Social Growth

One of the cheapest and best methods to convert wishlists into sales is organic social media. In the above example, we talked about the average CPW being between $1 and $3, but creating a strong organic social presence can lower that cost drastically. In fact, some indie developers see a CPW around $0.19 with a robust social strategy, which comes with additional benefits:

• Raising brand affinity around your game
• De-risking your launch from being completely unsuccessful
• Building a built-in audience that makes your game more appealing to publishers

When a user discovers your game through organic social channels, they often have multiple touchpoints with your content, including:

• Following you on social media
• Seeing your updates on social media (and hopefully, you’re posting frequently)
• Visiting your Steam page
• Playing your demo (if available)

These touchpoints cultivate a high-quality user who not only learns about your game but is consistently reminded that your game exists and will be releasing in the future. We’ve seen indie games that cultivate an organic social media strategy average around 50 wishlists a day, with spikes sometimes hitting 200 wishlists. Think about how 50 wishlist a days works strategically:

• Your launch is in another 6 months (or whatever timeframe)
• 182 days * 50 a day = 9,100 additional wishlist additions

To achieve these results, you need to create a relationship between your social following and your game. This can be done by:

• Linking your social media accounts within your game so people can follow you
• Adding your social media accounts to your Steam page so people can connect with you
• Posting consistently about your game to foster an organic following
• Directing social media followers to a LinkTree (or similar service) that leads back to your Steam page

The goal is to create a flywheel that drives both wishlist growth and social following growth, resulting in more engagement over time. If you need a full strategy on how to set this up, you can read this article that dives into the deeper complements of setting up a social strategy. While that article is highly recommended for its data-driven approach, here’s the gist:

1. Start posting different kinds of content—from devlogs and artwork to gameplay clips—and learn what resonates with your audience. Do this for at least a month.
2. After you identify the content that performs best, establish a posting cadence based on how far away from launch you are.
3. Over time, you should see both your follower count and wishlist totals steadily rise, rather than dropping back to zero.

At Glitch, organic social media is one of our specialties. We employ tools like Cross Promote, which automates cross-posting among indie developers and turns DevLogs into audience-building opportunities. Through this approach, we’ve seen games range from a low of around 18 wishlists per day up to highs of 200 per day.

Influencers for Long-Form Content

A common mistake many developers make when reaching out to creators is focusing exclusively on live streaming—on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, or any other platform with a real-time audience. While streaming is valuable, there is another tactic that can yield better continuous growth: long-form, evergreen content.

The main drawback with a live stream is that it’s ephemeral; the exposure only lasts as long as the stream itself. But if a creator makes something like a tutorial or review, it can live online indefinitely and continue to drive traffic over time. Evergreen content for games might include:

• Tutorials
• Reviews
• Reaction videos and commentary

For example, check out Crossing Minute on YouTube. When this creator uploads content, it may or may not go viral immediately. But over a longer period, that content gains views—sometimes reaching hundreds of thousands over time. We partially discuss this concept of Content LTV (lifetime value) in our video discussing the Compounding Effect.

The outcome is a single video that can reach 200k views even if it was released a year ago. This steady engagement helps drive consistent wishlist growth. Now, imagine multiplying that by 5 or 10 influencers, and you can see how your game might enjoy consistent wishlist gains for months.

• 3 videos by influencers that get generate 3k views a day for a year
• 365 days out from and 30 wishlist additions a day = 25,550 wishlist additions
• Continues to drive sales after launch as well

When choosing an influencer to do something like this withw, it's not just about the follower size. You need to look at:

1. Organic Reach: Which is the amount of people that their content is reaching based on their follower size. They should be reaching on average 5% to 10% of their total audience. Having low organic reach signals that their audience might not be engaged or might have fake followers.
2. Historical Growth: Try too look back at their content months or sometimes years. If there a noticeable historical growth of views in their content the longer back you research?
3. Engagement Rate: Based on the number of views that a piece of content gets, how many people actually engaged with the content (likes, shares, comments, etc). Should be above 2%, below that is a warning sign.

If you want to read a full article or watch a video on influencer marketing, check out our mini-guide on the subject. Overall, during NextFest, focus on livestreaming for immediate visibility. But after NextFest, pivot toward long-form content about your game to sustain growth.

Other Options for Growth

There are a few other ways to maintain growth after NextFest, though some can be challenging or might not generate reliable, long-term results:

• PR: Handling press is tricky because of the sheer volume of submissions. One journalist reported receiving over 900 press release submissions for NextFest. We’ll cover PR more in depth in a separate article, but just note that PR is extremely competitive at large festivals like NextFest.

• More Festivals: Entering additional gaming festivals is usually a good idea. The reason it wasn’t mentioned in depth above is that festivals aren’t reliable for sustained, long-term growth. They’re great for a spike in attention, but that spike often fades once the festival concludes.

Final Sparks of Insight

Navigating post-NextFest growth is all about strategically balancing your time, money, and creative resources. Whether you lean heavily on advertising, organic social media, influencer collaborations, or additional festivals, the key is to maintain consistency. Large spikes may give you a moment in the spotlight, but it’s the continuous, methodical effort that ensures your game remains on players’ minds—and in their wishlists—right up until launch. By carefully calculating your risks and focusing on the tactics that align with your budget and game pricing, you can transform those NextFest gains into a lasting trajectory of success.