The heart wants what it wants.
Just as prior wishlist chart-toppers The Day Before (lol), Manor Lords, and (briefly) Stray gave way to Hollow Knight: Silksong’s long reign, so too has Team Cherry’s platformer passed the torch to a new contender. Subnautica 2 is now the most wishlisted game on Steam, followed by Valve’s MOBA-shooter Deadlock. Slots three through five are taken up by Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, and Light No Fire.
Steam’s publicly available data isn’t the end-all, be-all of the hobby—not the least because it doesn’t account for other storefronts or console players—but it is useful for divining trends and getting a snapshot of the current gaming scene.
It’s kind of weird that the two most desired PC games of the moment are such basket cases, right? They boast pre-release anti-hype cycles to give the long Silksong silence a run for its money, yet we apparently can’t get enough of them.
Let’s start with Deadlock: Given the fact that it’s an honest-to-god new Valve game, it’s shocking it hasn’t just clinched number one by default. But it’s a kookster: The second most wishlisted game on Steam is already being played for free by tens of thousands of people—about 45k at the time of writing, according to SteamDB.
The game is not out, but we’re already at a point where lapsed players can have discussions about whether or not to come back to it. Before Deadlock’s playtest broke containment, it became the gaming story of the moment despite Valve pretending it didn’t even exist.
