How many wishlist games are too many?

My wishlist is huge. I add every game that I think could be interesting to play. Whenever there's a sale I can see all that is on discount and buy something if I want. That doesn't mean that I intend to buy all the stuff I have there at once. I have games on my wishlist sitting there for years.

But here's the thing, you can monitor the prices as times go by. You can see when there's a really good discount. For instance, one game might be like 40% on every sale for a long time, but then there's one daily deal or middle week sale when the game is 80%. That's when you might buy. Likely you wouldn't be able to tell is the best price if not for the wishlist. Also helps to know when the game is cheaper elsewhere cause you know your data. So, to me, a huge wishlist equals to be a smart customer.

You probably don't even remember half the games on your wishlist

Actually one of the main reasons to wishlist games for me. If I see an upcoming game that looks interesting for example, I can just wishlist it then when it releases I get an email from Steam. And from ITAD I get mails too anytime there's a discount for wishlisted games.
Then for the games I want the most I just put them on top and order them.

Small (no bigger than forty or fifty games) is better for me, but currently my wishlist is outnumbered by reality XD

Well I have over 1400 so...

I use my wishlist as a "Games I'm interested in that I'm willing to buy non-bundled" and I mostly use it for the discount notifications. I have different tiers for my wishlist on barter.vg which is sorted by how much I really want it. I wish there's an option for that on Steam, the current ranking system isn't all that great imo.

There should be no limits!
BTW thank you for the giveaway :)

I feel like I use my wishlist more as a way to easily track and find games on Steam that I find interesting and look like they would be fun to play. A lot of times the games I would consider as an actual wishlist item would be something I'm more familar with like a game from a dev I know, a popular game, a game in a series I like or a game in a genre I really like. I like trying games that I might not necessarily know with certainty will be an amazing game because sometimes they can give surprisingly good experiences. They can also give new and unique experiences.

I throw pretty much everything that looks kinda interesting into my wishlist so I can be aware of sales, giveaways, and bundles. I've also seen indie devs say they benefit from their games being wishlisted, so I have no reason to not!

The best use for the wishlist for me is to track games that look interesting when I'm going through my discovery queue, that doesn't mean I need to have them now, or need to play them right away, but if they come up in bundle or are cheap during a sale, then it's a useful way to track. When I have money to spend on steam during a sale, I'll filter my wishlist to see which are giving the best discounts, what price ranges they are hitting and then take a deeper look at reviews for them. Often a game that looks promising when it first comes up on the discovery queue has a slew of negative reviews by the time I get to it, so it gets removed at that point. From a short list of games in the right price range and 'value' I'll put together my shopping cart.
So yeah, I think it's all about management, same with having a big game library. If you have a system, then why not have as many games as you want on your wishlist?

I've got 150, but many are just games I'm keeping an eye on for later. I think when you start getting into the thousands the wishlist becomes bloated and useless.

The basis would probably start with how many games you've already got. If you're only just starting out, then there'll be TONS of older game recommendations that you don't have and haven't tried out, or don't really know which genres you prefer yet. Where as in a few years, you'll probably have played through a backlog of "classic" games, know which genres interest you and which don't and thus have a smaller wishlist. I try to keep mine under 200 with max 300, but I'd understand people having 300-500 on theirs.

I use it as half of a bookmark, keep an eye for games on sale, yes there's ITAD but I sync that with my steam wishlist. If you're worried about friends gifting then just keep the top 20-50 games organized, hopefully they'll pick from the top of the list and not the bottom.

I swear I have seen players with what looked like everything you can get on Steam on their wishlists.

I hadn't even looked at mine in a while. It appears that I have 57. I couple I don't even remember adding.

My WL has almost 750 elements :D Many DLC (like half of that are total war & paradox x'D). Before SG it was way smaller <50.

Mine is 310 right now
I think maybe I am interested in so many genres of games
Like I play: RTS, Grand strategy, Tactical shooters, Management games, platformers, point and click and others too

The only reason that would make sense to limit the number of WL games is the WL rule for certain giveaways that encourages you to put as many games on your list as possible. Personaly I only put games on my wishlist when I have the intention to acually buy them when they are 50% off or interesting (usually early access) games that are still missing a key feature, for example the English language support.
My wishlist looks like this:
20% upcoming games
30% free games
50% games < 20 bucks

Well, if I see a game I like (or I just want to keep an eye on, in case it's early access), i'll put it in wishlist, without wondering if i'm hitting some arbitrary quota I shouldn't go over (I have some 200 games in my wishlist right now IIRC, but even if I had 500 I wouldn't find it weird)

There are thousands of games on Steam nowadays and many of them are quite good. A wishlist is just a tool to keep track of games I'd want to try to get on a sale, if the price is right. I don't really "manage" it (moving titles up & down).

Well with the amount of stuff that get Rebooted /remade ... no number is to much.

If you into stuff that was Jap exclusive and started to be remade for the western audience and pushed on steam in...well any state . There is a TON of games .

I love RPG Maker small 3-5h long RPGs for example and there is hunderds of those to pick from.

So getting flamed/filtered cause you want to many games shouldnt be a thing ... :P

Wish for as much as you want , as long as you actually want it !

I make a point to keep my wishlist size fairly low. Currently I'm around 13. The point, for me, is to keep it small enough that I can pretty much actively remember every game on it and that ever game on it is actually something I want to play.

Well, personally, I figured it was easier to just fill my wishlist with the games I'm interested in seeing giveaways for, than trying to hide the 10k+ that I'm not interested in seeing. So my wishlist is pretty bloated with cheap bundle stuff that looked cool. I use a text file for my 'real' wishlist, and that's about a dozen games, which are ones I'm intending on buying at some point

I had 1000 just a month ago. Purged it down to 100 but now it's already close to 120. Growing too fast.
SG wishlist is just too convenient. No good way to sort giveaways you actually want to join. If only there was an SG wishlist.

Until recently I used my wishlist to mark interesting games and use it as a filter for SG. It's much easier to mark 1k interesting games than 10k games you have no interest in. It is also easier to track these interesting games when they go on sale especially with the convenient filter. That being said, it has resulted in some confusion among my friends what games I would like to receive. I suppose I could actually order my games so I could tell them the top X games, but I decided to start trimming it and hiding unwanted games on SG. I'm a little slow on removing games from my wishlist, though it is only a third of what it used to be, but I do have over 4700 games hidden on SG now.

My wishlist is or isn't that big, depends on point of view. But I don't really use it for any meaningful searching (it's too big for me to follow), I use it to get those Steam-sale mails for games I've found interesting for one reason or another.