Methodology

Where the data comes from

All calendar and ranking data comes from public Steam (Valve) pages and interfaces:

We collect data once a day overnight (starting at 01:15 UTC) and rebuild the pages right after — usually in the morning European time. Every day is stored separately, so we keep our own history of positions and release dates since 9 October 2026.

"Most anticipated" ranking

• Ranking position = the game's position on the Steam wishlist chart that day, among games that have not been released yet.
• Steam does not publish how many people have a game on their wishlist — it only shows the order. That is why we show a position, not a number of wishlists.
• It measures interest among PC players, not sales. Games available only on consoles or only outside Steam will not appear in the ranking.

"Trending" ranking

We compare a game's position on the wishlist chart today with its position about a week ago (we take the measurement from 3–10 days earlier, closest to 7 days). The ranking shows the games that climbed the most in that time. A game only appears once we have a measurement from at least 3 days earlier.

Calendar and release dates

• Steam often gives an imprecise date — just a month, a quarter, a year or "coming soon". We show it exactly as Steam gives it; the day-by-day calendar only lists games with a full date, and the rest go to "this month, no exact day" or "no date yet".
• When a publisher changes the date, we record it — the history of date changes is shown on the game page.
• The calendar includes games that have been in the top 2,000 of the wishlist chart at least once since we started collecting data.
• We skip games that Steam marks as containing adult-only content.

Game pages and automatically written texts

• The 300 highest-ranked unreleased games get their own page. A page address is assigned once and never changes.
• Descriptions on game pages, in the calendar and in the rankings are generated automatically — a program builds sentences from the data (date, platforms, ranking position, date changes) using fixed templates written separately for each of the 8 languages. Nobody writes these sentences by hand, but nothing in them is guessed either — every sentence comes from a specific number or date.
• Covers and thumbnails are official game images, displayed directly from Steam's servers, with a link to the game's store page.

Guides and news

• We write guides with the help of AI tools, but every fact is based on sources: developers' official sites and announcements, the game's Steam page, achievement statistics, and players' materials and comments. Sources are listed under each article, next to the "last checked" date.
• We do not guess things that cannot be confirmed in a source (for example how to unlock a secret) — we would rather say the information is not available yet.
• News items are summaries in our own words, with a link to the original source.
• When a game changes (patches, updates), we revise the guide and change its update date.

Limitations worth knowing

• We only take Steam into account — other stores and consoles do not affect the rankings.
• A wishlist shows interest, not how good a game is or how well it will sell.
• Our historical data starts on 9 October 2026; longer-term trends will follow as more measurements accumulate.
• Dates and descriptions come from the publisher on Steam — if there is a mistake there, it will appear here too until they fix it.

Report a mistake

Spotted a wrong date, a missing game or an error in a guide? Write to kontakt@afktimes.com. Who we are: About us.