Devlog viewers are invested in your game. Most never visit your Steam page because you never gave them a reason to. Wishlists don't grow by accident.
You post devlogs. People watch them. They leave comments about your shader work or your combat system or that one bug where the player phases through the floor. They care about the game.
Then you check your Steam wishlist count and it hasn't moved.
The viewers are there. The interest is real. But somewhere between watching a devlog and clicking "Add to your wishlist" on Steam, you're losing almost everyone.
A Steam wishlist isn't just a bookmark. It's a direct marketing channel to that player. When your game launches, goes on sale, or gets a major update, Steam emails every person who wishlisted it. It also sends push notifications through the Steam client and mobile app. (Steamworks Documentation)
According to Steam's own data, about 19% of wishlist additions convert to a sale within 12 months, with over half of those happening during discount events. For indie games the number tends to be lower, but even a conservative 10-15% conversion rate means every 1,000 wishlists translates to 100-150 eventual sales. (GameDiscoverCo, 2024-2025)
Wishlists also affect visibility. The Popular Upcoming section on Steam's front page is driven by wishlist velocity. Roughly 10,000 wishlists gets your game visible there during launch week. That's free front-page placement on the biggest PC game store in the world.
Chris Zukowski, who runs How To Market A Game and has consulted on dozens of indie launches, has been saying for years that wishlists are the single most important metric before launch. Not Twitter followers. Not Discord members. Wishlists. Because wishlists are the only pre-launch metric that directly converts to sales and visibility on the platform where people actually buy games.
YouTube doesn't link to Steam by default. There's no integration, no auto-detection, no "wishlist" button in the video player. If a viewer watches your devlog and wants to wishlist your game, they have to:
That's five steps. Most people won't do even two of them unprompted.
Your job is to collapse that into one step: click the link in the description.
YouTube descriptions collapse after 100-150 characters on desktop and even less on mobile. Everything after that requires a click to expand. Your Steam link has to live in those first visible lines.
Not after timestamps. Not after your Discord invite. Not in a block of 10 links. Right at the top, by itself, with a short sentence explaining what happens when they click.
Wishlist on Steam to get notified when it launches: [link]
That's the minimum. One sentence, one link. The viewer knows what they're getting (a notification at launch) and what to do (click).
If the devlog covers something specific, connect the wishlist ask to what they just watched:
The angle changes per episode. The placement stays the same: line one or two, one link, nothing competing with it above the fold.
Don't split attention between Steam, Discord, Patreon, and your newsletter in the first two lines. Every additional link above the fold reduces clicks on all of them.
Pick your current priority. If you're pre-launch and need wishlists, the Steam link wins. Period. Move Discord and everything else below the fold. When you shift to a different phase (demo live, early access, post-launch), you swap the priority link.
Steam uses regional pricing that adjusts to local purchasing power. A game priced at $20 in the US might cost the equivalent of $8-10 in Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, or Southeast Asia. Valve provides recommended regional prices, and most developers accept them or adjust slightly.
This means wishlisting costs nothing for the player regardless of where they are, and the eventual purchase price will be localized. If your devlog audience skews international (check your YouTube analytics), your Steam page is already set up to convert them at a price that makes sense for their region. You don't need to do anything extra for this to work.
Steam doesn't tell you which external source a wishlist came from. There's no built-in UTM tracking on the Steam store. But you can work around this.
Use a tracked redirect link (through Bitly, a custom short URL, or a tool like Sendari) so you know how many people clicked the link from YouTube. Then compare your click data with your wishlist graph on Steamworks. If you see a spike in wishlists that lines up with a devlog upload, you know that video drove results.
Over time, you'll notice patterns. Some devlog topics drive more wishlists than others. Boss reveals and playtest announcements tend to outperform sprint updates and bug fix logs. That doesn't mean you stop posting the quieter updates, but it tells you where to put extra effort into the Steam link placement and copy.
If you have 30 devlogs and only the latest 3 have a Steam link at the top, you're wasting the long tail. Older devlogs still get views from search and recommendations. Every one of them should have your wishlist link in the first line.
Updating 30 descriptions by hand is a slow afternoon. Sendari lets you push the same Steam link to every video in a playlist and keep it updated automatically when new devlogs go up, so you don't have to remember to paste it every time you upload.
