Silksong has 4.8 million Steam wishlists, more than any other 2025 game
Steam's top 5 most wishlisted 2025 games: A revered indie sequel, a return to form for a classic online shooter, a bold new multiplayer IP, a survival-horror reinvention, and a looter-shooter giant.
With gamescom right around the corner, we thought we’d shine the spotlight on the upcoming 2025 Steam games with the most wishlists.
Silksong is Steam’s most wishlisted 2025 game
Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight: Silksong leads with an extraordinary 4.8 million wishlists. Pre-launch numbers like these are impressive for a massive AAA release, let alone a project from a small indie team like this one.
There’s a lot of pent-up demand for this one.
The original Hollow Knight has built an intensely loyal following thanks to its impeccable design, precise combat, and richly atmospheric world (can you tell I’m a fan!?)
Every corner held secrets worth finding, every boss fight was a test of skill rather than patience, and every artistic choice was deliberate. The game’s pure quality took Metroidvania fans by surprise and broke out beyond that niche.
To that end, Hollow Knight has now sold over 9 million copies on Steam and has passed $95 million in revenues on the platform.
Silksong was initially planned as DLC for Hollow Knight. But as the scope grew, Team Cherry decided on a full-fledged sequel instead.
When it announced Silksong in 2019, hype skyrocketed. Seven years later, after many delays, Silksong has managed to sustain – and even grow – that anticipation despite an unusually sparse marketing cycle.
A recent announcement of Silksong being playable at gamescom has done gangbusters on socials, again spiking hype:
The high engagement makes sense. Silksong updates have been sporadic, sometimes a year or more apart. But the community treats each drip of information as an event in itself – whether it’s a blog post about enemy design, confirmation of a 2025 release, or even an update to the game’s Steam page.
The drip-feed strategy might seem odd in an industry where constant visibility is often equated with relevance, but in Silksong’s case, it has created a mystique.
If the game’s quality lives up to the hype, Silksong is on track to be a global hit. Its top two markets by wishlists are the US (20%) and China (15%), with countries like Russia, Germany, Japan, and the UK all in the top 10.
As Silksong is playable at gamescom, so maybe we’ll get a release date – or even a shadow drop – by this time next week.
On that note, we have a special gamescom promo running, letting you nab a free trial of our platform right here.
Battlefield 6 continues to snowball ahead of its second beta
Following on from a shrewd marketing campaign and a massively successful first beta, Battlefield 6 (#2) wishlists have shot through the roof, now sitting at 2.8 million. The full game is out on October 10.
We covered that to death in our newsletter from earlier this week, but here’s a quick update with our latest metrics (as of August 14):
Battlefield 6 is available to pre-order. So in addition to the 2.8 million wishlists, 657 K Steam buyers have already put money down on BF6, amounting to pre-sale revenues of $38 million.
Get a full deep dive into Battlefield 6, including whether or not it’ll be a CoD killer, here.
Battlefield’s second beta is running right now until the end of the weekend. We’ll be following up with new metrics on Monday next week, so hit subscribe for free below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready.
ARC Raiders is on track for success this October
Third-person extraction shooter ARC Raiders is #3 with 2.5 million wishlists. ARC comes from Embark Studios, a team coincidentally staffed with veterans of the Battlefield franchise.
Mechanically, ARC shares a lot of DNA with Escape From Tarkov, which is notorious for its ruthless gameplay loop. But ARC’s presentation and pace are designed to be more approachable without losing the tension that makes the genre tick.
Embark Studios ran a highly successful invite-only technical test earlier this year, generating significant buzz, even outperforming the hype cycle for Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon in some – ahem, most – circles.
But rather than build on that momentum with further public playtests, like Battlefield, Embark made the unusual decision to forgo ARC public access entirely until the full launch on October 30. It’s even skipping gamescom.
Here’s two ways to look at this this:
The optimistic reading is that Embark reckons ARC is already where it needs to be, and they want the launch experience to hit at full force without any risk of overexposure
The more cautious interpretation is that they’re protecting the game’s goodwill, avoiding the chance that a less-polished build or too much server stress might undermine that strong first impression
Either way, wishlists and general hype around ARC are strong. Around 37% of ARC’s wishlisters have played Helldivers 2 on Steam.
If ARC sticks the landing, it could be 2025’s Helldivers 2-level success story.
For reference, Helldivers 2 has now sold over 12 million copies on Steam (and another 5.2 million on PS5), with an Xbox release right around the corner.
Here’s an Alinea platform screenshot of some of our Helldivers 2 Steam data:
Want to check out our data for yourself? Get your free trial and demo right here.
Dying Light: The Beast and Borderlands 4 are also tracking incredibly well
At #4 with 2.3 million wishlists is Dying Light: The Beast. Like Silksong, this one was originally DLC but was shifted into a full standalone release back in 2023.
The result is a more focused, more survival-oriented take on the franchise, having a subtle but significant impact on how the game plays.
Whereas Dying Light 2’s urban environments encouraged vertical movement and sprawling parkour chains, the new Castor Woods environment shifts the emphasis to open spaces, wooded areas, and isolated structures.
Perhaps the biggest hook for fans is the return of Kyle Crane, the protagonist of the original Dying Light, which has sold around 20 million copies.
The audience for The Beast, which launches on September 19, is a hybrid one:
On one side, you have long-time Dying Light fans who want more of Techland’s fluid first-person movement and visceral combat
On the other, there’s survival horror players who may be less interested in parkour and more drawn to the atmosphere, resource scarcity, and cooperative tension.
By offering both, The Beast stands to pull from multiple adjacent fanbases, which explains its strong showing on the wishlist charts
Finally, Borderlands 4 rounds out the top 5 with 1.8 million wishlists. It launches on Sep 12, a week before Dying Light: The Beast. Yet, there’s just an 8% wishlister crossover between the two titles:
That said, it’s important to recognize that Borderlands has an established player base that hasn’t tended to wishlist as much as other game fans in the past.
Purchase intent is a given for many long-time fans of the IP, with no need to signal it via a Steam wishlist. Still, Borderlands 4’s presence here indicates substantial interest.
To put that in perspective, Borderlands 3 sold over 22 million copies – including 9 million on Steam – despite comparatively lower pre-launch metrics.
So that does it for the top 5 for 2025 games. This list didn’t include titles with non-2025 or TBC release dates. Luckily, we’re covering that via a top 10 in future editions of the newsletter, after gamescom.
Hit subscribe for free below to get that in your inbox first.
Wishlists don’t guarantee sales, but they are a great indication
Looking ahead, the wishlist success of the games mentioned in this newsletter doesn’t guarantee sales, but it does bode well.
Wishlist-to-sale conversion rates are a complex and uncertain topic among developers. Our data shows that there’s A LOT of variation.
Our CTO, Viktor Spindler (reach out to meet at gamescom), combed through the H1 data and found that higher wishlist numbers often lead not just to more conversions, but also higher conversion rates (in percentage terms).
There are outliers of course, but on average, the H1 data shows that games with over 500 K wishlists at launch converted 19% of wishlisters to buyers a day after launch. Meanwhile, 26% converted a week after launch, and 32% a month after launch.
The fewer the wishlists, the lower the conversion rates. Or more positively, the higher the wishlists, the BETTER the conversion rates.
That’s why huge wishlist numbers are a great tell for success stories, why investors and publishers are obsessed with wishlists, and why the games we’ve talked about in this newsletter are on track to absolutely smash it on release.
Other insights, links, and cool stuff
We’re off to gamescom early next week, and we’re there all week! So if you want to chat about games or get a demo of the most accurate analytics platform in games, reach out! We’d love to chat!
Our Battlefield 6 analysis has been resonating with the media, with coverage from IGN and Insider Gaming. We have an interview with Eurogamer going out soon, so look out for that too
We were recently live on Giant Bomb (Twitch and YouTube), chatting about gaming news, PlayStation’s strategy, Battlefield 6, Nintendo targeting pre-schoolers more heavily, and more. You can watch the VOD below
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