Game business and publishing has changed a lot, if you compare current situation with 90's or even 00's. This decade 2010 has seen the rise of F2P model in mobile gaming, and it has had a clear impact on how to publish and market your game. This can be seen on desktop games too. There are lots of free indie games available, and it is now a quite common thing, that publishers and stores throw out freebies. Gamification integrates games everywhere.
To prove my point that there are free games everywhere, just take a look at your Android phone. Did you know that there are at least one or two games hidden there (this depends on the brand and model of your phone. These did not work on a Huawei phone, but worked on OnePlus models I tested). You can find them, when you have NO data connection. You can easily simulate this by turning mobile data off in the settings, and then turning WiFi off. In some models when you open Chrome browser, type something in the search field and press enter, following page appears.
When you press that character in the page, a jumping game appears. This is a simple game that you play tapping the screen.
There is another one, that you can find through Google search bar. When data connection is off, you can type anything on Google search bar, and press enter. Then this page appears.
Again, press that animated character, and a simple Flappy Bird like game appears.
Really, why buy games with hard cash, when you kind find them anywhere for free. For many people these simple, free games are enough.
You can get more complex desktop games quite cheap on bundle sales, but you can also get them for free, if you just look carefully. GOG.com, Epic Games Store, Humble Bundle etc quite often give free games. EA was offering The Sims 4 for free etc. What does this mean? Although people still pay big bucks for a new AAA game, there is a clear atmosphere rising where more and more customers expect to get games very cheap, or even free. This has several consequences, like launching more and more games that rely on "games as a service" concept and heavy monetization mechanics.
For an indie developer whose focus is on "pay once, play as much as you like" type of games this is a troublesome era. It is really hard to predict what kind of sales figures your game may produce. Many years ago, social media was really good way to market your game. Now it is almost dead end. Also, popularity of your game project in social media can be very misleading for game developers inexperienced in marketing.
What Kimmo Kaunela wrote in his newsletter (https://kimmodesigner.substack.com) about cumulative likes ArtStation, how they distort the perspective on the quality, and generally do not measure the quality at all. This is obvious, because likes and followers measure the popularity, which depends on so many other dimensions than mere quality.
Same false perspective applies on marketing an indie game in social media. An indie developer may think that "I am making a break" when he sees 5000 followers in Twitter or Facebook, and gets constantly couple of hundred likes when he posts something. It is so easy to believe, that this game is going to sell well. Generally speaking, the situation is totally opposite. Those followers and likes indicate just interest for your game, and roughly speaking only 2% - 5% of those followers actually buy your game. Liking is so easy, but only few of them are willing to put money on the table, because you get games for free anyway.
There is also another factor that makes it really hard to use these followers and likes as a sales indicator. It is the game development community itself. It is very common that once you start to advertise your indie game project, you get lots of followers who are indie game developers just like you. It could happen that most of your followers are other devs. It is cool, of course, but in reality they are not interested in buying your game. They are interested in the development of your game, which is totally different perspective.
Also, game development community is full of hobbyists who have different view on marketing. Some of them are not interested in marketing at all, and are content to produce some games, and put them as free downloads somewhere. On the other hand, some have really unrealistic ideas that you could easily make millions with games.
What I am trying to say, is that do not let those numbers - followers, likes or Steam wishlists - to mislead your analysis on the prospective sales of your game. Likes do not put bread on the table, and neither do followers, until a small percentage of them actually buys your game. And selling your game will be hard, because there are so many free games available, but people have only limited time to play anything.