Indie devs obsess over wishlist counts, but the raw number lies. I have seen games with forty thousand wishlists flop and games with eight thousand do fine. The number that actually matters is the wishlist rate in the final month before launch, because that momentum is what the store algorithm rewards on release day. A flat wishlist graph means dead launch, no matter how big the total. So I stopped chasing a vanity total and started protecting the slope. I time my biggest trailer and press push for the four weeks before launch, not spread thin across a year. The graph curving up at the end did more for launch day than double the total ever could. Watch the slope, not the sum.