We make roguelike deckbuilders. It's one of the most crowded corners of Steam right now — about 180 of them at last count. So we did something unglamorous: we pulled the data on 150 of those games and asked a blunt question. What actually correlates with wishlists, and what's just folklore?

Here's what held up, what didn't, and one trap we nearly fell into. A caveat first: this is correlation on a single snapshot of ~150 games, not a law of nature. We'll be explicit about where the numbers get thin.

1. Wishlists are brutally top-heavy

The median game in our set has 360 wishlists. The mean is ~6,000. When the mean is 17× the median, you're not looking at a bell curve — you're looking at a power law.

The top 10% of games hold roughly 85% of all the wishlists in the cohort. Thirteen games cleared 10,000; twenty-eight sat under 100. If you're benchmarking your page against the breakout you saw on your timeline, you're benchmarking against the 1%. The realistic roguelike deckbuilder is a three-figure wishlist game — and that's the bar most of the field is actually clearing.

2. Most "this tag sells" advice is noise

We tested every tag carried by at least eight games — 66 of them — for wishlist lift, and put a real statistical bar in front of each: a bootstrap confidence interval on the median that has to clear the dataset baseline before we'll call it real.

Exactly three tags cleared it: Auto Battler (~4.1×), Sci-fi (~3.9×), and Turn-Based (~3.6×). That's the whole list. The flashy outliers you'd expect to "win" — the ones riding on a handful of split games — evaporated once we accounted for how noisy the median of a few skewed numbers actually is.

The honest read isn't "bolt on Auto Battler to win." It's that with ~150 games and this much variance, a single tag almost never moves the median on its own. Tag roulette isn't a strategy.

3. Localization correlates hard — and it's mostly a trap

This one looks like a cheat code. English-only games sit at 0.53× the baseline median. Games that support German, Brazilian Portuguese, or Traditional Chinese run 3–4.5×.

Don't read that as "translate into ten languages and wishlists appear." It's almost entirely reverse causality: broad localization is a proxy for budget and ambition. Teams that can fund eight languages can also fund the capsule art, the trailer, the marketing beats, and the scope that actually drive wishlists. The languages are a symptom of a serious project, not the cause of its numbers. Tellingly, the cheap-and-common Asian-language support in this China-heavy indie field — Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean — barely moves the needle. It's the expensive Western localizations that track with the big totals, because those are the ones that cost real money to commit to.

4. The generic, casual lane is the soft one

We grouped the field by tag profile and looked at each neighbourhood's median wishlists against how crowded it is. The most robust pattern: the casual / relaxing neighbourhood is among the most crowded (~37 games) and the softest (median ~190) — and it lines up exactly with the tag drags above, where Relaxing, Minimalist and Puzzle all sit below baseline. The healthier neighbourhoods lean into a hook — replay-value-driven roguelikes, card-battlers, action depth.

One honest caveat: this niche is homogeneous enough that the clusters overlap heavily, so read them as rough neighbourhoods, not hard genres. The takeaway that survives the fuzziness: generic doesn't pay. Tone and theme — the things that make a card game feel like a place — are where the differentiation, and the wishlists, actually live.

5. Check your data before you "discover" anything

The most useful finding wasn't about games at all. When we pulled follower counts and a third-party sales prediction, both showed a near-perfect 0.99 correlation with wishlists. Suspiciously perfect.

It was arithmetic. For 128 of the 150 games, the follower count was exactly wishlists ÷ 12 — an imputed placeholder, not measured data. The sales prediction was a fixed fraction of wishlists too. Only 22 games had genuinely independent follower numbers, and on those the correlation fell to a normal 0.92. (Our own game, Rogue Reigns, is one of the measured ones — and sits below that line.) If we'd trusted the headline figure, we'd have published a confident post about a relationship that was just our own input divided by twelve. Wishlists turned out to be the only independent success signal in the entire export — so that's the one we built everything else around.

How we did it

150 of the ~180 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam (a 2026 snapshot). Because wishlists are power-law distributed, we used medians (never averages) and a bootstrap confidence interval to decide whether any "lift" was real or just small-sample noise. Tags and genres are treated as content metadata; wishlists as the one independent outcome. None of this is causal — read it as a map of where the field is dense, where it's thin, and which "best practices" survive contact with the numbers.

We built an interactive version of all of it — every chart here, filterable, plus a per-game breakdown — and put it on our site. Explore the full interactive breakdown →

We're Venn Studios, a Brazilian studio building roguelike deckbuilders of our own — which is exactly why we wanted to see the field clearly. More research as we keep digging.