Your Wishlists Are Worth More Than You Think

If you’ve read our other stuff, you know the whole point of what we do here and our goal: pull the curtain back on what’s actually happening in game financing/publishing across the dozens of interactions we have with them weekly. We’re fortunate enough to see what’s going on in the proverbial publishing “streets” and be your reporter.

We talk/work with a lot of high wishlist titles (we’re talking 100k+, 1k+ wishlists per day) from small teams and I’m going to tell you what we tell them.

You are sitting on something extremely valuable and potentially life changing and you might be giving it away for free or less than you should.

The Mr Beast Problem

MrBeast averages 50 million+ views per video. A brand slides into his DMs and offers him ten grand to put their ad in this video.

He and his manager giggle (probably). They know exactly what ~50 million views are worth, and it is not ten grand.

The audience is proven. Few advertisers are going to speculate on whether people will show up, they already showed up and thus the price reflects that.

What keeps me up at night is developers with a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, four hundred thousand wishlists on steam are MrBeast in this story.

And they’re taking the ten grand.

Wishlists Are Your Viewership

When a publisher forecasts your game, they’re not staring into a crystal ball.

They’re running a fairly boring piece of math that starts with your wishlists. They take what you’ve got now, project what you’ll launch with, and assume some percentage converts in the first thirty days (historically somewhere in the teens to mid twenties). Back into a revenue number, shave off COGS (platform fees, forex, chargebacks), apply a discount/decay rate, and boom.

Let me be clear, there are a hundred variations on this. Different publishers weight things differently, some are folding in Steam followers and Discord numbers and all the newer signals, and the math gets more sophisticated than I’m making it sound.

But strip all of it away and the main fulcrum, the thing traction actually hangs on in today’s market, is still wishlists.

So when you’ve got 300k wishlists, you are not holding “hype.” You are holding a number that a forecaster looks at and goes: okay, that’s real revenue. You’re holding proof of audience. You’re holding MrBeast’s millions of views.

Here’s What That Leverage Actually Is

This is the part nobody tells you and the industry doesn’t mention.

Because your game now has a defensible forecastable revenue number attached to it, somebody will pay you for the right to publish it. Not “invest in the hope that it works”pay you, guaranteed, hell or high water, for the publishing rights.

The mechanism is called a minimum guarantee. When your game launches, the publisher pulls out their checkbook and begins using commas. Doesn’t matter how many units it sells. Doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or hailing. Doesn’t matter if LeBron comes home to Miami where he belongs (a Pat Riley stan can dream). You get that money, no matter what.

And if you’ve got serious wishlist numbers – 200k, 300k plus – that minimum guarantee can be life-changing money for small teams. Depending on the genre, production values, other factors, etc we’re potentially talking millions of dollars – guaranteed. Before a single copy sells.

This is what finance bros call hedging.

We are hedging the possibility of the game not doing well, the steam algorithm not supporting the launch, or marketing not landing for some reason by exchanging some part of our upside, but guaranteeing our floor.

Consider the Following – The Other Perspective

Here’s what that looks like from the other side of the table, so you can see it coming –

A publisher finds a solo dev with 400k wishlists and reaches out to the developer. The Developer is excited to chat with that publisher and tells them “I only need a couple of hundred thousand to finish.”

On paper that sounds like a lot of money to a solo dev or even a small team who’s been living on ramen for three years. But do the math on what 400k wishlists actually forecasts to – a/k/a a wildly favorable deal for the publisher – regardless of whether the revenue share is highly in the developer’s favor. It’s broken economics which is why if you have one of these games, you are getting bombarded with requests from publishers to chat – they want to find out:

A: If the game is good

B: If you only need a small amount to finish.

Speaking frankly, this is the best case scenario, as they don’t give a hell.

Our job is to make sure you don’t hand those rights over for crumbs. You do not sell MrBeast’s audience for ten grand.

It Doesn’t Have to Be All-or-Nothing

Here’s the other thing devs miss and something we get a lot: this isn’t one big binary “sell my soul or don’t” decision.

The rights are sliceable. You can do a worldwide deal for the biggest minimum guarantee. Or you can carve it up, give someone the rights in Asia, take a smaller minimum guarantee for just that region, and keep the rest.

And yes, you can still stack a production advance or salaries on top if you actually need the runway to finish. Plenty of teams feel like they can get the game to 1.0 on their own dime and just want the guaranteed payout. Plenty of others want money in the door now. Both are on the table. The minimum guarantee is the floor, not the ceiling.

My Plea dear reader

If you have a high amount of wishlists (100k+ total, and/or organic velocity of ~1k+ per day without marketing/an announcement push) and don’t need any money to finish and are hesitant to consider something like this. Please at least consider what I’m saying and chat with some of the publishers that are reaching out to you about a minimum guarantee – ask them what they’d be willing to do because you never know.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve got a real wishlist number, you’re not holding hype. You’re holding a proven audience, a forecastable revenue stream, and the right to a guaranteed payday that somebody out there very much wants to buy off you cheap.

You wouldn’t sell it for ten grand if you were Mr Beast. Don’t sell it for feastable crumbs as a developer.