The thing is we have been told over and over that the number of wishlists is the most correlated variable to revenue. From the perspective of a dev, it is normal to freak out when this number decreases. However, one has to realize it is a rule of thumb and the people who removed the game from their wishlist were likely part of the people who were not going to purchase it in the end anyway.
Is it total
number of wishlists or the overall
rate of wishlist actions?
Because as an example again, this chart:
Tells me very little about how many wishlists this game:
Was on before the sale and what the actual spike was. It was released in 2016, and only has "Mostly Positive" reviews (78% positive). Was it on 5,000 wishlists and saw 1,000 deletions? Was it on 20,000 wishlists and saw 100 deletions? Was it receiving an average of 2 wishlist actions a day and suddenly spiked to 50? Or was it receiving 100 wishlists actions a day and spiked to 500?
When I was going through my wishlist, personally, if I saw 3-5 year old games sitting in the "Mostly Positive" range, I was going to the store page, checking reviews and then deleting a bunch of them from my wishlist.
Maybe it is actually as "bad" as some of the devs are feeling, but without more contextual numbers and less spoopy, contextless graphs, I can't actually tell what the "damage" here is.