With survival hit follow-up Sons of the Forest finally out in Early Access on Steam, Starfield has claimed the top spot as the most wishlisted game on the biggest storefront in PC gaming.
The upcoming wishlist rankings on the Steam database put Starfield at number one, followed by 'Skyrim x Tarkov' dungeon crawler Dark and Darker at number two. Number three, a multiplayer party game appropriately called Party Animals, may be a surprise to some people, but it's amassed quite the following in the few years since its reveal.
Number four will likely come as less of a surprise: it's Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game so in-demand that playtesters are consoling fans when it inevitably doesn't show up at reveal showcases. (If you're a Hollow Knight fan looking to don the clown makeup once again, here's how to watch today's PlayStation State of Play showcase.)
The Day Before is a notable absentee here. It was once the most-wishlisted game on Steam, but it's since been pulled from the store entirely over an alleged copyright dispute which is somehow the least of developer Fntastic's increasingly bizarre and opaque problems.
The Steam database is ranking these games by how many people have wishlisted them, but it also shows how many followers they have, a separate metric that's also related to public interest. Starfield has 184,748 followers at the time of writing, and for comparison, Sons of the Forest was hovering around 230,000 shortly before its launch, while Dark and Darker is at 163,118. Interestingly, Party Animals dwarfs all of these at 421,994 followers, which goes to show how followers may not translate directly to wishlists, just as wishlists don't translate to sales one-to-one after launch.
Games generally see an uptick in wishlists closer to release as more information is revealed and as marketing ramps up, so Starfield and Dark and Darker may be duking it out for the top slot for a while. Bethesda's sci-fi epic is due for a dedicated showcase relatively soon, as Xbox announced last month, but Dark and Darker sees tremendous spikes in interest every time it runs a beta.
Sons of the Forest servers have been struggling on its big launch day, so while the game is technically out, plenty of players have had a hard time playing it.
