"Sounds like I'll be a millionaire soon": Steam error sends game wishlist numbers to the moon, indie devs take a moment to celebrate their new massive audiences before Valve fixes it

Steam's analytics tools are incredibly useful for developers and PRs, at least when they're working properly. After a two-week outage caused by the Summer Sale Event, several indie devs have found that their wishlist numbers have supposedly shot up astronomically.

One dev making a sci-fi platformer called Bzzt tweets: "Steam Analytics are finally back after the 14-day outage caused by the Summer Sale Event. Or... Are They? A few million wishlists per day for my Bzzzt game, sounds like I'll be a millionaire soon."

"Yeah we had similar craziness," replies Jake Birkett, developer of the upcoming Forbidden Solitaire, a creepy CD-ROM-era looking card game. It looks like a terrifying Balatro. The original poster pleads, "Nono! I trust the numbers are absolutely correct!!! Please, don't ruin my dreams!"

"We're at 14 million Wishlists? Yeah that sounds about right," quote tweets the Constance Twitter account, "a 2D hand-drawn action adventure featuring a paintbrush-wielding artist, trying to escape her decaying inner-world."

Apparently, this issue has already been fixed, so developers should be getting accurate analytics now. Sadly, there were not millions of wishlists for all, but hopefully the games this did happen to have managed to get some marketing out of the problem. Maybe they were even recommended to more people if Steam's backend also thought they'd been wishlisted a bunch?

In other Steam news, the PC gaming platform is now prohibiting games from violating the "rules and standards" of various payment processors and banks, which has some worried it could have far-reaching implications beyond just "certain kinds of adult-only content."

While you're here, check out our list of the best Steam games for 2025 that you should download right now.