We make roguelike deckbuilders. It's one of the most crowded corners of Steam right now — so before Steam Next Fest 2026, we did something unglamorous: we pulled the data on 149 roguelike-deckbuilders in the field 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 Next Fest 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 (~3.4×). 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 crowded lane is the worst lane

We clustered the field by tag profile, then plotted competition (how many games share a cluster) against performance (the cluster's median wishlists). The pattern is clean:

  • Atmospheric / Dark deckbuilders — the smallest cluster (13 games) and the highest median (~1,200). Uncrowded and over-performing.
  • Plain "Roguelike Deckbuilder / Card Game" — the biggest cluster (42 games) and a below-average median (~320). The most contested lane is also the least rewarding.
  • Relaxing / Casual deckbuilders — also crowded, also soft (~250 median).

Leaning into the dead-center "it's a roguelike deckbuilder" identity drops you into the most saturated, lowest-median pool on the board. 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 149 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 21 games had genuinely independent follower numbers, and on those the correlation fell to a normal 0.92. 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

149 roguelike-deckbuilders from Steam Next Fest 2026. 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 Next Fest 2026 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.