Steam's most wishlisted game gets knocked over by a cat

An orange cat sitting in front of a blurry cyberpunk-style city. — (Image credit: BlueTwelve Studio/Annapurna Interactive)

The Day Before, 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 by nearly a year, and now it's been surpassed on the chart by Stray, 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 than Stray. The list is sorted by "relevance," and according to Simon Carless of the GameDiscoveryCo newsletter, 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—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," and yeah, I definitely do.

PRODUCTS

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.