My New Wishlist Tool

It's your man, it's your boy, Chris Zukowski here, your friend, Chris Zukowski here. I got a new tool. Look at it back here. This is it. This is awesome. Uh this is my new site howtomarketagame.com/wishlists. Got a new tool, you can try it out right now. This video is to explain how this thing works, why I did this. Cool tips, how to use the shift button. People always forget the shift button. Uh let me show you. Okay, so I browse Reddit against my better judgment, against all You guys all should get off Reddit. Just get off of it. It's It's not worth your time. It's much people just complaining all the time. It's wasting time. You got a game dev to do. But when you do browse Reddit, let me let me just show you. I always see these posts. Look at this. Look at these Look at these wish list charts. They're so sad. They're like typed out in potted out in uh in MS Paint. I feel bad. I mean, I'm I'm not trying to call out these devs. And I understand you're busy. You got to make stuff. But it's so sad. Look at Look at this one. Look at this one here. This is I don't even know what this is. What What is that? It's got those weird little line, all this stuff. I mean,

this I can tell this guy didn't make He doesn't have many wish lists. Um but these charts are terrible. And you post them on Reddit, and they look terrible, and you're like potted them out, and they don't give you any math or anything. We're going to fix that. And I don't want to see any more bad charts on Reddit. Okay? I just don't want to see them anymore. Um so if you start seeing these charts on Reddit, say, "Hey, Chris has a new tool. You should You should put your wish list chart into this tool, howtomarketagame.com/wishlists." Let me walk through it. Let's go Let's go to the chart. So this chart is for this game, Execute. Uh this is my friend, Payne. Probably seen his YouTube channel, link to it below. Uh he gave me his his wish list chart. Uh and it's You just download it off Steamworks, gives it to me. You upload it into the tool. I'll show you exactly how it works, okay? But uh it's cool tool. You can just hover over anything, point in time, all that kind of stuff. You can do shift click, do an area, say Steam Next Fest. Get the whole total, 3,000 wish lists during that. Not the exact date. Uh but that's basically it. It's a It's an

annotation calculator {slash} wish list display thing that you can upload to Reddit and then it looks nice. It looks good. It doesn't look like you pawed it out with your little kitten paws on MS Paint and then uploaded it to Reddit and said, "Why aren't I getting wish lists?" Um now you can look professional when you ask, "Why am I not getting wish lists?" Uh so let's go through it. I'm going to just walk through the tips because nobody reads. I mean I have all these tips right here. See if you just click down here at the bottom, you see this thing right down here that says cool tips. You click that, it gives you all this stuff in text, but people don't know how to read anymore. So I have to be on YouTube, which sucks. Uh but people don't read, so all these tips are right in here. I describe everything that I'm going to talk to you in here, but for whatever reason people won't read. So I've got to show you cuz we are turning into an oral culture for better or for worse. I guess it's good for me cuz I can talk, but I wish we were a written culture still. It's really smart to be a written culture. So please read and read blogs. Don't spend too much time on YouTube. Anyway,

I'm rambling. Let's take a look at this chart tool. Okay, so what I'm going to do is when you come to howtomarketagame.com/wishlists, it's going to look like this behind you. It's going to be blank. If you have a Steam page, you have wish list. It's in CSV, which is comma separated values chart. You click this, it tells you exactly how to download. I'm not going to read it to you even though it's an oral culture now cuz people don't read anymore. Please read this. This tells you step-by-step how to download the right CSV chart cuz there's a couple. It's really confusing on Steamworks. That's why I had to put the starting in red. People download the wrong chart. My my my my site automatically checks if you gave me the wrong chart and it'll give you a little error. It says, "You gave me the wrong CSV chart." Once you download the right one, all you do is you can either just drag it in. You just drag it over this thing. You go from your your file explorer and you drag the CSV into howtomarketagame.com/wishlists and it'll make the chart. Or you could click load and then you can't see this, but it pops up a little dialogue, and you can pick the file there. I'm going to load up execute again, cuz it's a

it's a neat incremental game. Well, it's actually a decremental, cuz it decrements stuff. You just drag it on in here, and you get the wish list chart. I'm going to show you a couple cool tools that you're going to want to use with this thing. Here's the thing. You can click anywhere, and it'll tell you the daily whatever happened on that day. Like you got five wish lists this day, four wish lists, three wish lists. You can do the net or the sum. Some people like to factor in the difference between net and sum is it just factors into deletes. So, if you do net, it's like when he started right here, he had 610 net wish lists. That's what it is now that we're in net mode. And then what you can do is you just do a one single click. Well, let me just do that again. One single click, type a note, and I know because I know Pain and what he did, this is the start of Steam Next Fest. In October, he had 610 wish lists at the start of it. And you can use these little tools. You can zoom in, and just get a nice view. Or you can edit the note, that kind of stuff, or delete this

this thing. Now, this is where I have to remind you, hold the shift button, and you can do an area select. So, we'll start here, and we'll do this. And then I think Next Fest here, we'll have to you'll have to look it up. I think it was about right here. You can look it up when your Next Fest actually ended. I'm just going off this. So, I've done a shift select, and I want to say Steam Next Fest. And we want to do the sum. I mean, you could do net. I like the sum, cuz it's more positive. Who cares about deletes? And then what you do is you just hit save, and now I know he got 2,697 wish lists during Steam Next Fest. Isn't that nice? So much better than MS Paint. And you can do that kind of stuff. The other cool thing is you could do like if you just kind of like browsing around, you're like you know, these early days, how many wish lists a day was I getting? Like this, average daily. Look at that. Six wish lists a day. It's not that great. He did great with Execute. Don't get me wrong. But in the early days,

he was only getting six a day. I say minimum you should be getting 10 a day. You're hot if you get a 100 a day. Okay? Um you can just hit cancel. Or you could say uh early days wish list. Great. Hit save. Yeah, you can do that. See? Six a day. See, it just saves cuz we're in average daily mode. You say, "Hey, during this early time, I only got six per days." Whatever visual you want to talk to on your Reddit friends when you share your chart, up to you, whatever you want to do. But if you don't want to go manually and do that, I got a new tool for you. Watch this. Go down here. Total wish list velocity. That's what you want. That's what people always like, "Oh, am I I'm getting velocity?" Heat chart. Look at this. What it does is it it has how many a day. And like I said, 10 20 not that great. I call that cool. This is not This chart is not average for everybody. There's no curve. Because it like if you had This chart is hard-coded to be these rates cuz I know

these are good rates. People like, "Oh, I'm getting so many wish lists." I'm like, "You're not really." I don't want to tell people that, so I'm using software to be mean to people so I don't have to be mean to them. But anyway, so like if you're getting wish 100 wish lists a day, you're hot. And if you're getting more than that, you're a red hot. You were like diamond tier. And this is based off my own data that I've cuz I've worked with a lot of games and I've seen a lot of data and I know what's good. This is not It's not relativistic cuz sometimes like when you use this heat chart, it'll just pick whatever your your highest rate is and it'll say that's red hot and then everything else will be blue and then it'll do a gradient all the way through that. That's not helpful for anybody cuz then that just gives you a false sense of hope. And I'm not for that. I want to I want to crush your dreams nice and early. And so what this does is it's based off of real data from real Steam games. And so you get to see real data. So really Pain with his game Execute was ice cold for a long time. Steam Next Fest he got hot, went back to cold right after Steam Next Fest. Right through after that after he

launched is back up to hot. Now here's the thing you're going to see when you start doing this. Once you launch, Steam wants to promote you. It gives you more daily wish list because Valve knows if I show you this this game and you buy it, that gives us money right away. So Valve is much your your game earns so many more wish list post launch. Um So then we got our launch here. Uh a couple other cool tools that you can do is again like I like to see I always like to see what it how many wish list did you have going in because people are like, "Oh, how was how was popular upcoming? How did you get into popular upcoming?" So we can do popular upcoming start and we know it was net. So he he got into popular upcoming with 5,227 net wish list. So right there. So we answer that question right there for the kids. I'm going to turn off velocity real quick. Um So so right there. So people know. And then you can say like, "Oh, well how many wish list did you get when you're in popular upcoming?" And you're like, "Oh, I got this many wish list." And you go pop upcoming. And say that, he got about almost 2,000

wish list in popular upcoming. Isn't that awesome? See, this tool gives you the explanations. And then you can upload this to you know, Reddit and tell your friends about it. Now if you like "Hey Chris, how do I do that? How do I upload to Reddit?" I'll show you. This is this export tool. You click down here. The one I'm going to show you right now, this is the best one for Reddit. You click export image. I'm not going to show you but it downloads uh you can't see it cuz there's a little pop up. It'll download the file name. It'll just download as a little PNG. And it kind of cleans it up like you won't see all the little icons and stuff. You won't see all these little buttons and stuff. It just makes it nice and presentable so you can just upload it straight to Reddit and say, "Here's my wish list. This was this campaign." And you can even do stuff like, "Hey Reddit, why why no wish lists?" Cuz that's what people always ask on Reddit. I don't know. It's just endlessly people asking why they don't have wish lists. Uh so, you can do that. Um so, that's that. Uh the couple other things like if you want to just hide the tool tips, you can. You just want to look at a pretty chart, you can do it. Um total wish lists, it just does it to some it just

flips the chart cuz some people like to see this cumulative wish list graph, but it keeps all your notes there, so you can kind of see. You can see when I went into popular upcoming here, you see how popular upcoming it just you just see the the slope of the chart gets a lot faster and stuff like that. So, uh just a different way of visualizing it, different way of doing it. Um these control how the tool tip works, this sort of stuff whether your tool tip is in some mode or net mode or daily mode. Um all those things. Now, a couple other cool tools that you can do if you have a website, which I highly recommend, guys get websites. Don't post on Reddit, post to your own website because you own your own website. If you have your own website and you want to post your own chart, you can do a couple things. You can just export it as an HTML. And then you have an HTML version of your of your of your thing. And then you just upload that as a page on its own. Or you can export it as an embeddable HTML. And what this does is it See, when when you embed this chart on your own site, it is

like you have all these export tools and stuff like that. It's really for yourself that export that HTML download thing, that mode. That's for yourself so cuz you can make all these edits and stuff like that. If you want to make it so people can't download this, kind of like a read-only thing, you use the embeddable uh export embeddable HTML. And it just copies it to your clipboard. And then if you have like a WordPress site or some other site that accepts iframes and all that stuff, you just copy that HTML in there, boom. And then they can't export it They can They can add notes cuz they can It's nice to have people allow them to be like, "Oh man, this game looks cool. How many wish lists did I get over here?" You can do some like highlighting and stuff, and you can even add notes to somebody else's thing. But you can't export it and all that kind of stuff. It's kind of like a a step back so you can let people look and browse at it but not interact too much with it. Um the other one is export CSV, which is this top red one, and that just takes the CSV that you got from Steam,

and it uh adds all your notes in there. And that I recommend. You've done a lot of editing and you're like, "Ah, I did a bunch of added a bunch of notes. I'm going to keep going." Export as CSV, then you have it on your hard drive. See, the thing is like if you close your browser, you just close this so that I'm not going to do it now because we're talking here. But if you close it and then you open it again, as long as you're in the same browser or like the same computer, it saves this locally. So, it'll keep track. You don't have to like hit save or something. It'll save it. But if you go to a different computer or something or you I don't know I don't know exactly like you clear your cookies or something. I don't know exactly know how it works. Cloud AI did the whole thing for me. You'll lose it. You'll lose all this work that you did. So, I'd always recommend export as CSV, and that just saves your file, okay? Now, you might be like, "Well, Chris, in a month I'm going to have a whole new set of wish lists. Maybe I got into some festivals. Maybe I got a YouTube content creator to play my game. I'm going to have new wish lists." Here's what you do. Look at this. Watch this trick. You can't really see this,

but I have the same game, but Payne gave me an update. He was like, this couple months later, and he said, "Hey, here's some more wish lists." I'm just going to grab that updated chart. So, you would go back, you download the CSV, okay? And I'm just going to click You can't really see this, but I'm on a on a file browser. I'm going to dry drag the new CSV that I just downloaded like months It's got months new of data. Watch, I'm going to drag it over right into here. See how highlighted all of a sudden? That's cuz I'm dragging a file over. Boom. Boom. Do you see how it's now you got a whole bunch of more months? It saves the notes and just appends on the end all the new wishlists that you got. Isn't that cool? That's cool. That is cool. So, what you can do now is you just kind of keep a record of CSVs and what I recommend is you just have a folder somewhere that just has the history of them and you just have them they're all date stamped. And so, you just keep appending it every time you download a new CSV of all your latest stuff, you just keep dragging the new one in there, export as CSV, save that, and just keep stacking on top of them and keep adding

them. So, this is all his new stuff. Let's look at his velocity. Ooh, pain. He's kind of cooling down a little bit. See how it's kind of cooled down a little bit? He's red hot for a while. Look at these. I bet these are a couple sales or bundles and stuff, but it kind of s- cooled down. See? Good good information that you have here. All right. Couple other cool things. I'm going to show this. Uh we're going to do a new thing. We're going to do new and a new chart. This is really cool. So, let's say you have two games or you and a friend are comparing, you know, just measuring how you compare. Um I'm going to go to a friend of mine, Fox Knocks. We all know Fox Knocks. He had a game called Nomad Sur- uh let's do Cannon Quirk cuz Nomad Survival's been out for a while, so it blows out my chart real big. This is a game called Cannon Quirk. And we're going to do this thing. Here's one game that he released. You can tell when he released. I think this is a Steam Next Fest. Uh September? I don't think that's Steam Next Fest. That might be some other big thing that Oh, that I think this is his Steam Next

Steam Next Steam Ween Next Fest. Let's just call it that, Steam Next Fest. I'm not entirely sure if that was. Then we're going to do this. Watch. File. Instead of loading CSV, we're going to compare CSV. And you can't see this, but a file selector picked up pulled up. And you can pick his other game or see how I left a note there. Once Once you leave a note, then it's like you're serious about this one. I can go grab his other game, which is let's just say Nomad because the guy makes a game like one a year, which is what you all should be doing. You should be making more games. Drag his other game in here, and it'll say, "Hey, what do you want to do? Do you want to blow away what you've worked on, or do you want to compare?" We want to compare. So, now we are in two chart mode. We're in double chart mode. And so, Nomad Idle is in blue, Kin and Quarry is in red, and now the charts have smashed the dates, and it's now based no longer on dates. It's now based on linear time. So, it's like day 0 1 2 3.

They They've lined up. So, we can see like the interesting thing here. This is what what I love about the guy. Look at how how he's always He launches his game within 266 days to to 90. He launched them within a month of each In other words, like the amount of time he spent working on his game is basically the same. He keeps his game He's He's on it. He's on it. And so, you can kind of see like, "Oh, yeah. He He launches his games always right around 260 days thereabouts." Um and you can say like uh you could do stuff like, "Oh, how was his first 2 weeks for his two games?" Because maybe you have your two games, so let's do 2 weeks. Because I've If you look at my um benchmarks, I always People always ask, "How was my first 2 weeks?" And it doesn't matter, folks. It doesn't matter because the Steam algorithm actually doesn't care about your first 2 weeks. It doesn't matter. But people always ask, so I did benchmarks. So, if you go to howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks, you can see the benchmarks. And um I just picked random 2 weeks. This is

just random. It's not There's nothing in the algorithm that talks about 2 weeks. I just do it cuz it's like I had to pick sometime. It's a heuristic. First 2 weeks. And you can see Look at this. Nomad Idle only had 272 297, which was just the first 2 weeks. Kennen Quarry had 1,700 wish list. So, you can kind of see compare like what was going on? Let's zoom in right here. Look. Look at what Kennen Quarry did. Went way up at the front. I don't remember what Fox Nocks did there, but it was pretty cool what he did. Did something cool with that game. And then you can do the comparisons, too. Like, oh yeah, when when when I launched uh Nomad Idol, I had Let's look at your net wish lists. When I launched it, I kind of went into launch with 32,000 wish lists, whereas Kennen Quarry went in with 13,000 wish lists. This one's a little hard, but you can see velocity. Both of them kind of cooled down here. This one's harder to see cuz they're overlapping. But you can look at the velocity of the charts here, and you can kind of see how things

went. This one I'm not totally into, but what you can do, you can temporarily hide this one. You can say like, get this Nomad Idol. Let's see. Ooh, I was cool down here. Let's see. Kennen Quarry. Ooh, I was hot for most of this part here. So, you can kind of just temporarily turn these on and off. You can hide them and show them and stuff like that. And if you're like, get rid of this one. Kennen Quarry, get rid of it. Keeps your Keeps tool tip notes, the notes that you wrote. Keeps them right there. That's it. That's just just a tool for you to do all this stuff. Let's you kind of look at it. By the way, this is all free. I'm just giving this away for free cuz I'm so sick of seeing bad charts on Reddit. So, I next time somebody posts a uh MS Paint thing in the comments say This has a tool. howtomarketagame.com/wishlists. Make your chart look better, dude. And then get off Reddit cuz it's a waste of your time. And you're spending too much time on Reddit and not enough time making your game. Before I uh I'm still going. I'm still going. There's still more features. This is a cool tool. I didn't This isn't just some

something I AI hacked out in a weekend. Did it for a couple months. Um This one. This is This is the release. So, data privacy. This is all in the browser. This is There's no server back end. It's just a It's an HTML the whole thing. I bet I think I There's some stuff obfuscated, but it's it's all in HTML. There's no server back end. I'm not like watching every I'm not like watching you like every every time you like secret publisher meeting deal and then that's like oh and then I'm like oh he's doing secret stuff. I don't I don't see your data as long as you're entering it or saving it or exporting CSV. I don't see it. I don't I don't even know how I would see it cuz it's all in HTML. But if you really thought you did something cool cuz I get this all the time. People email me and they're like Chris I did this thing and it was really cool and I like hearing that. I love hearing those things cuz it kind of keeps my ear to the ground, see what's going on, what's working, what's not.

People always tell me like Chris I did all these things and I was like well can you send me the wish list chart? It really helps. So now what I did was see this thing called send to Chris? Click this. You put in your email address. That's required cuz I got to know how to follow back to you. Um this is this will show me your chart. You will send the CSV data. I will see your notes. I will see your wish list data. Now if you are a big time publisher or something and you're like Chris this is secret. Don't share with anybody. I will never share this stuff. I will not share. Whatever you send to me I promise that is not implicit consent. It's not you saying hey you can write about this or something. I won't write about it. I won't tell anybody. I'm I keep this stuff lock and key down. Um but if it's really cool um I might email you back and say whoa that was cool. So it's like hey Mr. Mr. Man at my game is cool.com Um that's your email address and they say Chris uh I went viral when I um

yelled out my window. It actually works. See what I did. Uh made Yeah. And then you send that to me. I get an email in your email address and then a CSV all bundled together and I see it there. And then if I'm like, "Whoa, I've never heard of that technique. Can I write about it?" I will go to your email address and be like, "Hey, Mr. Man, can I write about your wish list thing and show off your chart?" And then you give me consent and all that stuff. But again, if you just send this to me, I promise. I promise. Swear to God. Everything. I will never share your data without first asking like, "Hey, can I share this?" So, rest assured, if you just want to share or something, you just want to be proud about what something you did, send me the data and I I promise I won't share it anywhere. Um So, that's that. Um and then this also helps Oh, and also

stupid clear. I'm not doing consulting. Don't say like, "Hey Chris, why am I not getting wish list? Can you consult?" I won't answer because I get that that question, "Why am I not getting wish list?" so often. I actually wrote a blog post which I'm going to link down below called, "Why am I not getting wish lists?" Don't read that. I I can't. It's complicated. Takes me a long time. I'm not doing consulting cuz it takes too long and then I have to break people's hearts and say like, "Well, your game is not that good." I have to break people's hearts. And I don't like to do that. It hurts my feelings. Hurts their feelings. And I just feel bad and it takes so much long so time so much time and there's so many people who need help that I can't do it. So, don't send this to Chris and say, "Why am I not getting wish list?" Please don't make a joke and be like, "Chris said not to send wish lists and I'm going to send him that." I don't have time to look through it and don't do it as a joke. I'm really busy. But if you if you're proud of you doing something like, "Hey Chris, look at what happened on this date. I did this thing." Send it to me. I want to see that stuff. I won't respond all the time. I might just say, "Hey, it looks cool." Um I'm not going to write about you most likely. Probably not. Uh but I I just like to

have my ear to the ground and and I'll I'll give you a thumbs up like, "Hey, way to go." The other thing is, if you have feedback, you're like, "Chris, I really want this feature. I wish this happened." Click the feedback button, put your email and your comment. I get an email for that, too. So, I like to see that. It does not send you your data. If you give me feedback, I don't get your CSV, so don't worry if you're like really like it's really NDA, like you can't send me that. Don't worry, the feedback does not include your CSV. Just tell me that Tell me what's going on. Say like, "Hey, Chris, when I save and load and then save and load, it uh it crashes." If it's something like that, then sure, tell me about that. I like to know it. Um I think that is every feature. I'm going to be adding features all the time. Uh there'll be new stuff all the time. Um let me just make sure that I got all the options. Yeah, just don't forget about shift. People always forget about shift. Hold shift, click, click, and then you get the area chart. People do so many one-off ones and they're like,

"I wish I had the area thing." I was like, "Hold shift." So, don't forget about hold shift. Um and if you really don't know how to do stuff, hit cool tips and then do some reading. Please read the instructions. They're really cool. Um and then I kind of just grab how to do that, what all these exports do. So, I hope you you fill it out. I hope the charts on Reddit start looking better. I'm tired of these MS Paint abominations. Uh please make your charts on Reddit look better. Um please tell people who have MS Paint be nice, but tell them, "Hey, you know, Chris has a tool where you can track all this stuff and get It'll auto calculate how much you made during that period that you just MS Painted." Um so, please do that. Uh good luck out there. I hope you have a good summer. Um I'll see you around. Bye. Um I'll see you later. Bye.

Mhm.