wishvane Straight answers about where the numbers come from, how honest they are, and what wishvane will and won't tell you before you spend months building.
Two public sources, both credited. Steam provides a game's price, release date, and review counts; SteamSpy (used under CC BY-NC) adds its owner estimates and the by-tag samples behind the genre reads. wishvane turns those into copy and revenue estimates. It never uses private or scraped data, and it never shows a number it cannot source.
A game's public review count is a rough proxy for how many people own it: only a fraction of buyers ever leave a review, so multiplying the review count by a factor lands you in the right neighbourhood. wishvane uses that review-to-owners method, the one the indie community already leans on, adjusted for release year, and always shows it as a range. The raw review count is the quiet engine behind the estimate, never the headline.
They are estimates, and wishvane labels every one. Copies come from a review-count proxy, so read them as a range, not a receipt. Revenue is shakier still: it multiplies the copies estimate by list price and takes Steam's roughly 30% cut, so it stacks one estimate on top of another. Good for sizing a genre's realistic ceiling, not a substitute for a game's actual sales figures.
Because an exact number would be a false promise. The underlying data is a proxy, so the honest output is a labeled band with the method shown, not a fake-precise point. A range tells you the realistic spread; a single figure would just hide the uncertainty.
No, and anyone who claims they can is guessing. wishvane tells you what a genre realistically produces: what a typical game does, what the top of the genre does, and where the money tends to land. Whether yours beats that comes down to your game, your marketing, and some luck. It sizes the opportunity; it does not predict your outcome.
Because there is no clean, legal, free source for them, and wishvane would rather say nothing than show a number it invented. Wishlists in particular are private to each developer. If that ever changes, we will add them honestly; until then, we are upfront that they are missing.
It depends on how much the genre's tag has to work with. A genre read is built from a systematic SteamSpy sample of that tag, and wishvane shows you the sample size so you can judge it. A big, well-tagged genre gives a confident read; a thin or fuzzy niche gets hedged, or wishvane says it cannot place it yet rather than generalising from a handful of games.
They answer two different questions and are never blended into one. The market read is the whole genre, from a systematic SteamSpy tag sample: the citable ceiling. The cohort read is only the games gathered on wishvane in that genre, a smaller, self-selected set shown as exactly that. One says the market, the other says gathered here, and neither is dressed up as the other.
It is free, and no. You can look up any game or genre and size up your own concept without signing up. Your comparison lives in your browser, so you can come back to it, and share it with a link, without an account.
Just about any published Steam game. Type a name or paste a store link and wishvane assembles its page on the spot: the estimated copies and revenue, how it compares to its neighbours, and the genre it sits in. The first look takes a second to build; after that it is instant.
Yes. A comparison you build lives under a private link that search engines are told to ignore, so it never shows up in search. Only the public example and the game and genre pages are indexable. Nothing is tied to your identity, because there is no account.