Steam's Coming Soon List Skips 71% of Games. What Earns Followers
71% of upcoming Steam games show no release date and never appear in the default Coming Soon list. Demos earn 1.67x the followers. Data from 60,790 games.
71% of the games waiting to launch on Steam show “Coming soon” or “To be announced” where the release date goes, and none of them appear in Steam’s default Coming Soon list. Every page with a date does. We checked 1,000 games drawn at random from all 60,790 upcoming games on Steam, then pulled the store pages and follower counts of 400 of them to see what else separates a followed page from a quiet one.
Key findings
- Steam’s default Coming Soon list only includes store pages that show a release date, and 71% of upcoming games show none, so they never appear in it.
- The median upcoming Steam game has 23 followers. 77% have fewer than 100, while Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games have a median of 781.
- Store pages that have been live longest have 15.6 times the followers of the newest pages, the largest difference anywhere in the data.
- Upcoming games with a playable demo have 1.67 times the followers of comparable games without one, yet only 31% of upcoming pages have a demo, against 72% of Steam’s top 180.
- Games that support 10 or more languages have 1.83 times the followers of games that support one.
- Trailer count, screenshot count, and the way the short description opens make no measurable difference to follower counts.
Why isn’t my game in Steam’s Coming Soon list?
Because the page has no release date. Steam’s default Coming Soon list is the set of upcoming pages that show a date, from an exact day down to just a year, and a page that says “Coming soon” or “To be announced” is left out.
Steam says 60,816 games are coming soon. Its Coming Soon search, in the order it opens by default, reports 17,128 of them: 28% of the total. In our random draw of 1,000 upcoming games, 29% showed a date. Those two shares match because they’re the same pages.
Figure 1. Share of upcoming Steam games found in the default Coming Soon view, by what the page shows where the release date goes.
| What the page shows | Pages checked | In the default list |
|---|---|---|
| An exact date (e.g. Mar 12, 2027) | 72 | 72 |
| Any date, searched by exact name | 13 | 13 |
| ”Coming soon” | 452 | 0 |
| ”To be announced” | 249 | 0 |
| No date, searched by exact name | 6 | 0 |
The name search settles it. We looked up sampled games by their exact names, once in Steam’s default order and once sorted by name. All 13 dated games came back in the default order. All 6 undated games came back only when the same search was sorted by name.
Big names fall out too. Atomic Heart 2 has 28,542 followers, the most of any game in our random sample, and its page says “To be announced.” Love & Fool’s Gold has 3,408 followers and a playable demo, which puts it in the top 1% of upcoming games, and its “Coming soon” date line keeps it off the list. Both pages can be followed and found by name. Neither shows up for someone browsing what’s coming next.
How many followers does an upcoming Steam game have?
23, at the median. A follower is someone who clicked Follow on a store page, and Valve’s Followers documentation says the count shows as the member count of the game’s community group.
Figure 2. Followers per game in a random sample of 400 upcoming Steam games, on a log scale, against the median of Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games.
77% of upcoming games have fewer than 100 followers and 97% have fewer than 1,000. One in 400 passes 10,000. The 180 games at the top of Steam’s popular-upcoming list have a median of 781, more than 96% of all upcoming games, and their top end is in a different league: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV has 96,242 followers.
So benchmark a page against the random 400, not against the games you’ve heard of. A page with 100 followers is already in the top quarter.
What gets an upcoming Steam game more followers?
Time on the store, a demo, and languages. Those three stood apart once we compared pages of the same genre, age, publisher status, and early access status.
Figure 3. Each row compares follower counts with a reference page of the same genre, page age, publisher status, and early access status. Purple rows are measurable differences.
Does the age of a store page matter?
More than anything else on the page. The oldest fifth of upcoming pages have 15.6 times the followers of the newest fifth. Steam hands out app IDs in order, so a lower ID means the page went up earlier, and median followers fall steadily from 138 for the oldest tenth to 3 for the newest.
Figure 4. Median followers by app ID tenth. A lower app ID means the store page went up earlier.
Valve’s Coming Soon guidance tells teams they can put a page up well before release. The follower counts show what that’s worth: a page collects followers for as long as it’s live, and the teams that wait give up months of them.
Does a demo get more Steam followers?
Yes. Pages with a demo have 1.67 times the followers of matched pages without one, and a median of 40 followers against 16. Only 31% of upcoming pages link a demo. Among Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games, 72% do, including Emberville (51,287 followers) and Hela: of Mice & Magic (41,958).
Do more languages help?
Yes, at ten or more. Games that support 10 or more languages have 1.83 times the followers of games that support one. 16% of upcoming games reach that mark. The median game supports 2 languages; the median game in Steam’s top 180 supports 10. Foxy Dumplings, from our random sample, does both: 14 languages, a demo, and 3,530 followers, the second-highest count among the 400.
What doesn’t change Steam follower counts?
Trailer count, screenshot count, the opening of the short description, self-publishing, and early access. None of them moved followers once page age and genre were matched, so time spent there is better spent on a date, a demo, or another language.
- Trailers. 64% of upcoming pages have exactly one trailer and 24% have none. Pages with none, or with two or three, track pages with one.
- Screenshots. 74% of pages have five to nine, and 29% stop at exactly the five that Valve’s store asset rules require. More screenshots didn’t separate from the rest.
- The short description. 45% open by naming the genre (“A pirate roguelike drawn on a 1600s sea chart”), 28% open on what the player does, and 20% on the premise. None of the openings beat the others.
The trailer count doesn’t matter, but the first trailer is worth a look. Valve’s trailer guidance says it “highly recommend[s] that the first trailer you list on your store page is primarily gameplay.” Among upcoming pages with a trailer, only 17% title the first one as gameplay, and most just call it “Trailer.” Among Steam’s top 180, 26% do.
What do Steam’s most popular upcoming games do differently?
They show an exact date, ship a demo, and support far more languages. 95% of Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games show an exact release date, against 8% of all upcoming games, and only 5 of the 180 show no date at all.
| All upcoming (random 400) | Top tenth of the 400 | Steam’s top 180 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median followers | 23 | 608 | 781 |
| Exact release date shown | 8% | 10% | 95% |
| Demo linked | 31% | 40% | 72% |
| Any trailer titled as gameplay | 15% | 25% | 33% |
| Median supported languages | 2 | 2.5 | 10 |
| Self-published | 87% | 88% | 67% |
The exact date is the cleanest line in that table. Steam’s own popularity list is almost entirely made of pages with a date, and a page without one isn’t in the list Steam opens by default.
What to do before your Steam page goes live
This is the checklist we use for Steam launches, straight from the data above.
- Put a date on the page from day one, even if it’s only a year. “Coming soon” keeps the page out of Steam’s default upcoming list. A year or a quarter can be narrowed later.
- Put the page up early. Page age is the biggest difference in the data: the oldest fifth of pages have 15.6 times the followers of the newest.
- Plan a demo for the store page, not for launch week. Demos go with 1.67 times the followers, and fewer than a third of upcoming pages have one.
- Localize into 10 or more languages if the budget allows. That’s 1.83 times the followers, and 84% of upcoming games stop short of it.
- Make the first trailer gameplay and call it that. One good trailer beats three, and Valve asks for gameplay first.
- Benchmark your followers against pages of the same age. The newest tenth of pages have a median of 3 followers, so a two-week-old page with 30 is well ahead.
These findings are one of three Hi Violet studies on how games find an audience, alongside what breakout game devlogs on TikTok have in common and how AI-made 3D game art performs on TikTok.
How we did it
We collected everything from Steam’s own public endpoints, with no login, no API key, and no third-party mirror. Every one of the 1,469 requests is logged with its time, status, and a checksum of the response.
- Every upcoming game. We paged Steam’s full Coming Soon list for games (US store, English) in name order: 60,790 distinct unreleased games, against the 60,816 Steam reports.
- The default list. Steam’s default Coming Soon view reports 17,128 games. We paged it in its own order and recorded the 13,258 distinct games it returned, then searched sampled games by exact name in both the default order and name order.
- The samples. A seeded random draw of 1,000 games from the 60,790 for the default-list check, and the first 400 of that same draw for everything about followers. Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games are a separate comparison group, never mixed into the 400.
- The store pages. Steam’s store-browse service, a public method under the Steam Web API Terms of Use, returned each game’s tags, trailer titles, screenshots, demo, early access status, release-date display, developers and publishers, supported languages, and short description.
- The followers. We read each game’s follower count as the member count of its community group, the number Valve’s Followers documentation says it displays.
- The labels. An LLM (openai/gpt-oss-120b through OpenRouter, temperature 0) labeled how each short description opens and what each trailer title says the trailer is. All labeling cost under five cents.
- The comparison. Follower counts are heavily skewed, so we compare medians and fit one regression on log followers that matches each page on primary genre, self-publishing, early access, and page age (its position among the 60,790 app IDs). Each multiplier comes with a 95% interval, the range the true multiplier falls in at 95% confidence, and we report a difference when that whole range sits above or below 1x.
FAQ
Why isn’t my game in Steam’s Coming Soon list?
Steam’s default Coming Soon list only shows store pages with a release date. In our check of 1,000 random upcoming games, every page with an exact date was in it, and none of the 707 pages saying “Coming soon” or “To be announced” were. Add a date, even just a year, and the page qualifies.
How many followers does an upcoming Steam game have?
Very few. In a random sample of 400 upcoming Steam games, the median was 23 followers, 77% had fewer than 100, and only one passed 10,000. Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games had a median of 781 followers, which puts them above 96% of all upcoming games.
Does a demo get more Steam followers?
Yes. Upcoming games with a demo on their store page had 1.67 times the followers of comparable games without one, matched on genre, page age, publisher, and early access. Only 31% of upcoming pages have a demo, compared with 72% of Steam’s 180 most popular upcoming games.
Does the age of a Steam store page affect followers?
Yes, more than anything else we measured. The oldest fifth of upcoming store pages had 15.6 times the followers of the newest fifth. Median followers fell from 138 for the oldest tenth of pages to 3 for the newest, so a page that goes up early has months longer to collect followers.
Do more trailers or screenshots get more Steam followers?
No. Pages with no trailer or with two or three trailers had the same follower counts as pages with one, once page age and genre were matched, and screenshot count made no difference either. 64% of upcoming pages have exactly one trailer, and 29% stop at the five screenshots Valve requires.
Are Steam followers the same as wishlists?
No. Following and wishlisting are separate buttons on a Steam store page, and Steam does not publish wishlist counts. The follower count is the one public demand number an unreleased game has, shown as the member count of the game’s community group, which is why this study measures followers.
