What Steam's Most Wishlisted Games Say About 2026 Trends
The wishlist charts are the closest thing PC gaming has to a demand forecast, and this year they have been unusually revealing about what people want.
Wishlists are the most honest signal on Steam. A wishlist costs nothing, requires no commitment, and nobody adds a game to one to make a point. It’s a straightforward record of intent, and publishers treat the number as a serious sales forecast because it correlates well with launch performance.
The 2026 charts have moved around more than usual, and the movement is the interesting part.
Where the year started
In February, Subnautica 2 led the games with a 2026 date at around 3.8 million wishlists. Forza Horizon 6 sat second with roughly 2.6 million, and Resident Evil Requiem third at about 2.5 million.
All three are sequels or continuations of established series. That’s the least surprising fact in this article and it remains the dominant pattern: wishlists reward recognition, and the ceiling for an unknown property is far lower than for a known one.
What changed by mid-year
By July the picture looked different, and the leader is a genuine outlier.
Deadlock has accumulated more than 5.5 million wishlist adds according to independent tracking, and it has done so without a confirmed release date, without a public gameplay trailer, and without a formally confirmed genre. That’s an extraordinary result for a product that has essentially not been marketed.
What it demonstrates is that Valve’s own name still functions differently from everyone else’s, and that a long, semi-public playtest can build demand more effectively than a conventional campaign. It isn’t a repeatable lesson for most studios, since almost nobody else has that reservoir of goodwill to draw on.
For context on scale, the most wishlisted 2025 title reached around 4.8 million, so the numbers at the top of the chart have grown rather than plateaued.
What Summer Game Fest surfaced
The post-event rankings in June are usually a better read on genuine appetite than the pre-event ones, because they reflect people responding to something they have just seen.
Resident Evil Veronica, Guild Wars 3, 1666: Amsterdam and Lords of the Fallen II were among the strongest performers. Two of those are established series continuing, one is a long-dormant project resurfacing, and one is a sequel to a game that recovered its reputation through post-launch support.
That last category is worth noting. A game that launched to mixed reception and then improved substantially can build real demand for its sequel, which wasn’t obviously true a decade ago.
The patterns worth reading
Survival and co-op keep outperforming their coverage
Subnautica 2 leading the 2026-dated chart for months is consistent with a broader pattern: survival and cooperative games generate wishlist numbers well ahead of the press attention they receive. This is a genre where the audience is larger and quieter than the discourse suggests.
Nothing needs a date any more
Several of the highest wishlisted titles have no release date. Historically a date was the trigger for wishlist growth. Now sustained visibility does the job, and studios have adjusted by announcing much earlier and confirming much later.
The gap between top and middle is widening
Numbers at the very top have grown substantially year on year. Numbers in the middle of the chart have not moved nearly as much. Attention is concentrating, which is the same dynamic visible in sales, in streaming and in coverage.
The caveat that matters
Wishlists measure interest, not conversion. A large number is a good predictor of launch sales when the game arrives in the state people expected, and a very poor one when it doesn’t. There’s a well-populated history of heavily wishlisted games that underperformed badly on release.
They also decay. A wishlist added three years before launch is worth considerably less than one added last month, and the headline totals don’t distinguish between them. Publishers know this and adjust internally. The public charts don’t.