Wishlist Inflation is out of control transcript

This is going to be a quick one, but I was recently talking to a game developer and he was talking about like the game he was going to be making. He wanted to like start a new studio and he had like some previous experience in game development and he's like, "Yeah, I'm going to be making a game. Like this is the game idea that I think is going to get a lot of wish lists." And he kind of mentioned this very offhandedly and he probably didn't even mean anything specifically by it, but I had to stop him there for a second.

Where there is this problem, your goal shouldn't be to make a game that gets a lot of wish lists. It's a side product. Your goal should be to make a game that sells a lot of copies. The end goal of you making games isn't to make wish lists. It's to become a game developer and you do that by having money. And this is a trend that I see more and more in game development where there is this concept called Goodhart's law.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Where we have articles like for example here this one the how to market a game benchmarks. How many wish lists should I have at launch? 5,000? 8,000? 50,000? 90,000? Where people will see this and they're like, "Oh, if my game doesn't have 50,000 or 8,000 wish lists, it's doomed." And they regardless, no matter what the cost is, will try to get to that certain amount of wish lists. 10,000 wish lists, however much.

The problem is that you will sometimes then not understand that wish lists, you know, they don't mean sales and you end up with stories like this for example. 10K wish lists at launch, 2% conversion rate after 1 week. Did we do something wrong? And you know, you guys can go and like look at all of the like Steam page things. This is not what I'm going for. I think the question is more if you have 10,000 wish lists, you may also just be reaching the wrong audience.

You may be reaching an audience of people who are like, "Hey, this is an interesting game, but I'm not really planning on buying this." Like actually spending money for something is still different. This is kind of a a trap I see often and I know the developers on YouTube. I don't know. I don't mean to dog on him, but there is this game called Sensory Overload, um, which did very well on the marketing side with like shorts and things like that.

You know, like the trailer is made to be a short, okay? And it has worked really well. This game is at 80,000 wishlists. But I think my biggest worry for a game like this is that this is a game that is designed to be marketable. This is a game that is designed to get wishlists where you start with the idea of this would be good short-form content. And this is just me. This is my personal opinion, but I think this game is going to have pretty bad conversion on launch because this may just not be a game people actually want to buy and pay money for.

And and that's kind of the problem I see more and more with not just this game, but with people who have a game and they just start spamming short short shorts or like other like advertising and things like that because yeah, to a certain degree if you spend X amount of money or X amount of effort on YouTube shorts or on TikToks or on Reddit ads there will be an ROI. You will get a certain level of wishlists. But these may not be the quality wishlists that you're looking for.

So I think that's kind of the the thing I want to say. I think it's maybe even good that the personal calendar got introduced compared to, um, to like old way of popular upcoming where you are less incentivized now to just hit 7,000 wishlists no matter what. Whereas you saw that before where there was a genuine strategy of like, okay, let's say you're at 5,000 wishlists, okay, we're going to spend $2,500 on Reddit ads to get some more wishlists to then get into popular upcoming to then get more, um, wishlists in general again, which may mean that, you know, you're spending money on wishlists that are lower quality.

Whereas with personal calendar that like arbitrary number of 7,000 wishlists something around that does fall away, but I think you shouldn't lose sight of your main goal. And that main goal is just to make a game that people want. Of course, having something that is marketable is going to help. Having a game that looks visually interesting is going to be an important thing as well, but it shouldn't be the only thing you care about.

Something that is visually cool and people want to wish list that then falls flat in terms of marketing or in terms of like actual like gameplay experience is still going to leave you with a net negative at the end of the as developer. You need to find the balance between those two things and of course that's easier said than done. Having something that's great and marketable and that people want to play, those things do exist definitely.

I just wanted to make this video to say like don't only chase wish lists. You see this also where wish lists also have gotten over inflated now where all of these numbers it's like okay if you have no less than 10,000 why should we even post about like our game? It's not even that special anymore. It's like yeah, but you'd rather have 10,000 wish lists that convert at 20% than 50,000 wish lists that convert at 2% because most of your wish lists just come from an audience that actually doesn't really vibe with your game that much.

Niches are still important and I think one thing that I didn't mention in the rest of the video I'm recording this afterwards is the two reasons why I think it's actually bad to get these kinds of wish lists cuz for for example since we over all human like hey they still have 80k wish lists so at like a 2% conversion rate they're still getting some decent money. I think two main problems. Problem number one is going to be that these wish lists will give you a false sense of like your outcome.

How much money are you actually going to earn? I remember that with Fort Industry where I think we had 2,500 wish lists. It wasn't much but it was like our first game and we're like okay 10% conversion rate so 250 copies sold at like $16 a copy so we immediately like kind of felt like oh we're going to make this much money. But that didn't happen and that's kind of a trap that you have of like developers kind of quitting their jobs or whatever because they plan a big game release only to then get punched in the face with a bad conversion rate.

And then problem number two is the amount of time and effort you have to market is finite where sure you could get a lot of wish lists through for example short form content and get really good at short-form content, but that is inevitably going to take away some of your other marketing power or some other of your time that you could spend on working on the game. Always something has to give, and the question is just is getting high amounts of low conversion wishlists, is that going to be the thing that's I'm going to put this like the highest value, and that means that maybe a different kind of marketing or a different like part of my game development is going to suffer, and that's kind of the trade-off that you don't really know.

But, that is what you should keep in mind as well. You still want to get a few thousand wishlists at least, I would say. Otherwise, there may just not be a big enough interest group for your game to begin with, but it's kind of just what I wanted to talk about. Goodhart's law, it applies to more than just game development, it applies to everything in life as well. So, if you didn't know this one, now you know. Try not to put too much value on like specific KPIs that are not driving your business at the end of the day.

Driving your business means like making money. That's all I had to say. We upload these videos two times a week. If you head down below, you can subscribe, and you'll be notified whenever we upload next, because this was just something that had been on my mind. I was taking a shower, and I'm like, I want to make a quick video about this. So, I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.