Overview

Once your game has a publicly visible store page listed within Steam, players may begin adding your game to their wishlist. Prior to the release of your game, this gives you a place to point your fans and interested players where they can take action to express their interest and keep track of your game. Along the way, this gives you a sense of the level of interest by potential customers and a way of notifying interested customers when your game releases or goes on discount.

Wishlist Notifications

Email notifications may be sent to customers based on a variety of trigger actions related to your game, software, or video on Steam. These triggers may change in the future, but this is a description of current set of features.

Discount e-mails typically send within a few hours of your product's release or discount. In high volume e-mail periods, time to notification will be longer.

Customers who have been notified about your game within the last week (including "now available" e-mails from product launches) will be on e-mail cooldown, and will not receive additional communication until the week-long period has passed.

Note that customers must have verified their e-mail account to receive messages, and that some customers may have opted to configure their e-mail preferences to not receive some or all of these kinds of e-mails.

Product Launches (Release or Early Access)

When your game releases, either in Early Access or as Full Release, any user that has the game on their wishlist at that time will receive an e-mail notification about the game being available.

If your game has released in Early Access and then transitions to Full Release, another e-mail will be sent to users with the game on their wishlist at that time.

For more information on preparing for release, please see the Release Process documentation.

Promotional Discounts

Any type of discount at or above 20%, whether a curated feature spot, a weeklong deal, or a custom configured discount will trigger a notification e-mail to users with your game on their wishlist.

Discounts must, at a minimum, affect the lowest priced package for a game. For example, if you have a $20 Regular and $30 Deluxe package for your game, just discounting the the Deluxe package would not trigger wishlist notification e-mails, you would also need to discount the Regular package.

Discounts must be global. There may be different packages across regions, but all regions must be discounted.

Discounts must be over 8 hours in duration, and may not be over one week old.

For more information on discounts, please see the Discounting documentation.

Your Wishlist Data

Within each app's details page on the Sales & Activation Reports Portal, you'll find a section for "Wishlists". This section tracks additions, purchases, and deletions by users that have your game on their wishlist. Additionally, you can see a breakdown of wishlist numbers by region or country in the "Regional sales report" section for each app. Wishlist data is updated daily for the previous date (ie. as of March 2nd, you can see all of the data up to March 1st)

You can also find some past analysis of wishlist behavior written up in the Steamworks Developer Group here, including averages on conversion rate from wishlist e-mails and conversions of wishlists over time.

Best Practices

Here’s our three biggest suggestions:

1. Put up a Coming Soon page as soon as you’re ready and able, so interested customers can add your product to their wishlist and get notified at launch.
   
2. Stay engaged over time—don’t just launch your game and move on to the next one. Many users will wait for a reason to buy your title, such as a transition out of Early Access, a content update, discount, or a friend to play the game with.
   
3. Look back at Wishlist data after a sale or promotional event to guide your future decisions. Trends over time can help you determine what communication is generating the most interest, both in terms of purchases and wishlists.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long after trigger are e-mail notifications sent?

A: E-mail notifications may be sent out over multiple hours depending on how many users the system needs to send to. Additionally, notification emails may include several titles, depending on how many a customer has on their wishlist.

Q: Is there a cooldown on how often an email is sent for a particular product?

A: If notification events for a specific product occur closer than a week or two together, the second e-mail may not be sent to the same user.

Q: Where can a user configure their e-mail preferences?

A: From the upper-right corner in Steam, select your user name to activate the drop-down and select "Account Details." From there, you can select "Manage Email Preferences" to pick which types of communication you wish to receive.

Q: Will all customers receive wishlist notifications?

A: Only customers who have verified their email address with Steam will receive notifications.

Q: How do I track activity from email notifications?

A: If an email notification is sent for your title, visits to your store page will be visible by going to “Marketing & Visibility” -> ”Traffic Breakdown” on your App Landing Page.

Additionally, you can monitor e-mail campaigns and conversion rates by going to the financial reporting site, clicking “View detailed wishlist breakdown” and scrolling to the bottom of the page. It will show you e-mail notifications sent during the selected time period.