Hey Guys, I'm jumping on this (old) wagon as I had a similar question and I find the previous two replies are probably still interesting.

So we released our VR game "Rainbow Reactor" last tuesday and while we - as more or less hobby devs - didn't have the highest expectations, the sales are still underwhelming, even though the game is featured quite nicely in Steam's VR section, we got more than 10 Youtubers make a video, 10 curator reviews and so on…

Still we only sell about 15 games a day, which would be totally fine, if not for the widely accepted prediction that the first week makes up about 25% of lifetime sales and the first month will be about 50% of lifetime sales

So I kind of hoped that our (relatively) high wishlist adds of about 40 per day could still mean some "offset success". To answer OPs question, our conversion rate is currently 7.2 percent.
My own question would have been what Steam users make wishlist adds for and what it all means, but this question has mainly been answered by the previous two posters: It's more of a note pad that people hardly ever get back to, even though some do in case of a sale. The latter is good to know, only thing is, we started with a launch discount of 40% so I don't expect the game to be cheaper than that for quite some time 

Anyhow, I guess we'll just have to make do with what it is and try to finish our Early Access phase without losing too much motivation… maybe we can talk ourselves into thinking that people only wishlist the game so they are reminded when it leaves Early Access 

Still if anyone has some more insight or tips, that would be highly appreciated!

Here's the link to our Steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/789090/Rainbow_Reactor/

Helloes, the tl;dr is: I'm Kalle from Germany and I'm trying to get into game development after a 25+ years absence!

Bit longer: I fell in love with games when my parents took me to Australia when I was 9 and I saw arcade games for the first time. Especially PAC-MAN inspired my imagination, so back at home, I nagged til I got the TOMY version of it, then an Atari VCS 2600, one year later came the C64 and since the day the Amiga 500 was announced, I saved every penny til I could afford it. Then aged 16, I released my first game "Hirnris", which was a clone of Hatris, only with brains, as a Public Domain title. Half a year later, in 1991, I finished coding "Matchic". That one was "heavily inspired" by Puzznic (well, I just love arcade games, what can I do?) and I was utterly amazed when a publisher I sent it to on a 3,5" disk via snail mail actually said they were going to release it commercially! I could go into great detail of how naive I was and how funny the German games "industry" was back then, but to cut a long story short, the publisher went bankrupt after they sold 3 copies of Matchic and that kind of broke my heart. It was my first experience at "business", being still a high school student, and apparently it created a lasting trauma.
I know, boo hoo … but today, I'm *almost* over it, so I returned to trying to make games, but for obvious reasons (like not wanting to get banned right away), i'll talk more about that some time later.

Til then, I leave you with a video of my last Amiga game in action - I believe it really is one rare sight