Median Steam Follower Count for Unreleased Games Is 12, Volunteer Analysis Finds
The follower and wishlist benchmarks circulating among indie developers come from the visible top of the distribution; the median title in this tally has 12 followers, which is the number a developer is actually competing against when judging a demo's reach before Steam Next Fest.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
An indie developer behind the Steam marketing tool NextWishlist analyzed roughly 8,000 unreleased Steam games with demos, excluding major publishers, and posted the results to r/gamemarketing on October 13. The median follower count was 12. Games at 100 or more followers made up about 14.3% of the total, and 42% of the titles surveyed did not link a single social media account.
The tally covers roughly 8,000 unreleased Steam games with demos, excluding titles from major publishers, and was run ahead of Steam Next Fest. Dream_Ep estimated follower counts convert to wishlists at roughly 10 times, putting the median title near 120 wishlists.
The distribution skews low: games with 1,000 or more followers were about 3% of the total, and those above 10,000 about 0.3%. Among 1,200 games measured over one week, the top 10% gained 74% of all new followers. Dream_Ep also found that 42% of surveyed titles linked no social media account, and said more linked accounts correlates with more followers, while noting the relationship is correlation, not causation.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.