Steam's regularly held new product trial event "Steam Next Fest" (Steam New Product Festival) will launch a large number of trial versions of games every time, and its core purpose is to market the games that are about to be released. Recently, overseas media How To Market A Game conducted a survey on the relationship between trial versions and wishlist addition behavior, revealing interesting user behavior patterns.

Not only do they buy the game but don’t play it, Steam surveys show that a large number of users add the game to their wishlist without trying it out.

During the Steam New Product Festival, developers will receive summary data from Valve after the event, including indicators such as the total number of players in the trial version, the total number of wishlist additions, and the number of users who added wishlists after playing.

How To Market A Game collected and analyzed the developer data of 108 works in the New Product Festival in June this year. Statistics show that the conversion rate of these 108 games (that is, the proportion of wishlists added after playing the trial version) ranges from 0% to about 50%, with half of the games concentrated between 15% and 24%, with a median of 19.3%. This means that, on average, 1 out of every 4 to 5 players who play the game will wishlist the game.

Not only do they buy the game but don’t play it, Steam surveys show that a large number of users add the game to their wishlist without trying it out.

Not only do they buy the game but don’t play it, Steam surveys show that a large number of users add the game to their wishlist without trying it out.

A particularly noteworthy phenomenon in the survey is that a large number of users directly added wishlists after the trial version was launched without actually playing it. Taking a game with a conversion rate of about 24.5% as an example, during the event, 175 users added to their wishlist after playing the trial version, while 507 people added to their wishlist directly without playing the game.

Another set of data comes from one of the top 50 most played games in the New Product Festival in June this year - the raccoon physics adventure game "Trash Day". During the event, 6,143 users added to their wishlist after playing the trial version, while 6,828 people added directly without playing the game (the game’s conversion rate is approximately 18.7%).

Not only do they buy the game but don’t play it, Steam surveys show that a large number of users add the game to their wishlist without trying it out.

Why do players add wishlists without playing the demo? There are various possible reasons: the screenshots and trailers on the store page alone are enough to understand the content of the game, the game itself belongs to the user's preferred genre, or the players themselves are fans of the development studio. In any case, data shows that during the Steam New Product Festival, a considerable number of users made the decision to add to their wishlist without actually playing the demo version.

For developers, the median conversion rate of 19.3% may be lower than some people expect. However, How To Market A Game pointed out that there are a certain number of users on Steam who will play almost all trial versions, including content creators such as Internet celebrity anchors-such users will dabble in game types that are not their preference. Therefore, developers should not be overly anxious about the conversion rate of their works based on this data alone.