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Gnimmel's avatar
Gnimmel
Start Member
1 month ago

Wishlist 180 day restriction

Hi everyone,

I’m currently planning the roadmap for my upcoming title, targeting a Q1 2027 release. I’m looking to start building my community and capturing wishlists now to ensure a strong launch, but I’ve just discovered the 180 day restriction for "Coming Soon" listings on the Horizon Store.

Steam's philosophy is to get your store page up as early as possible, sometimes years in advance, to get as many wish lists as possible. This allows indie devs to funnel all social media and press traffic to a single source from day one.

With the current Meta policy, I have to wait until late 2026 to even have a presence on the Store. Any hype generated now has nowhere to go on the platform, forcing me to use third-party tools (Discord/Email) which have much higher friction for users than a simple "Wishlist" button on their headset.

My questions for the community and Meta team:

  • Is the 180 days just a suggestion and really I could submit a page now?
  • If not, what is the internal reasoning for this limit? I can see a possible issue with vaporware, but I've already sunk a lot of work into my project (which I hope shows in the screen shots and video),  and I would not want to give up on it now.
  • How are other devs handling long-term "wishlisting" when the platform itself blocks the page until 6 months before launch?

I’d love to understand the strategy here, as it feels like we are losing out on a lot of early organic discovery compared to other platforms.

Thanks!

1 Reply

  • Degly's avatar
    Degly
    Start Partner

    The 180-day limit is enforced, not just a suggestion and you won’t be able to publish a Coming Soon page earlier.

    Why I think it exists and it's better to have it:

    • Meta prioritizes fresh, near-term releases in the store
    • Reduces stale/vaporware pages and keeps conversion higher (imagine the amount of 2050 releases there would be)

    What I tell my devs to do instead:

    • Build a Discord + email list early (yes, more friction, but necessary)
    • Use a landing page as the main funnel (Link-in-bio, etc.)
    • Drive traffic to socials + creators, not the store yet

    Then activate hard once the Coming Soon page is live (last 3–6 months)

    Good luck!

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