The Day Before (opens in new tab), an open-world zombie survival game, isn’t the most original idea for a videogame ever, but it definitely managed to capture the imaginations of an awful lot of gamers: For a long time it sat atop the list of most wishlisted game on Steam. But in May, The Day Before was delayed (opens in new tab) by nearly a year, and now it’s been surpassed on the chart by Stray (opens in new tab), the game about a cat making his way in a city inhabited by robots.
Here’s how the top ten currently shakes out:
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Stray has been wishlisted more than The Day Before, or any other game on the list—many of which actually have thousands more followers (opens in new tab) than Stray. The list is sorted by “relevance,” and according to Simon Carless of the GameDiscoveryCo newsletter (opens in new tab), that means there’s a touch of the ol’ Steam algorithmic magic at work too.
“The ‘top wishlists’ Steam chart is not 100% how many total wishlists you’ve received,” Carless wrote. “It’s majority that, but also affected by wishlist velocity. So games adding wishlists swiftly can chart higher. And games with lots of wishlists, but adding literally zero may not appear at all.”
Stray has been getting a lot of attention lately, thanks both to its upcoming release—it’s out on July 19—and the fact that it looks fantastic: Weird, funny, sweet, and legitimately different and distinct from everything else out there. (Science also tells us that cats are objectively better than dogs (opens in new tab)—as videogame protagonists, anyway.) Apparently that sudden influx of interest was enough to put Stray on top, and with all due respect to The Day Before, I think that’s where it belongs. We said last month that “everybody does want to be a cat, actually (opens in new tab),” and yeah, I definitely do.
