If you've been keeping an eye on Steam's cozy game section lately, you already know the drill: cats sell. Cat Parents, the indie rescue sim from developer Gaze In Games, just proved that point harder than anyone expected, crossing 100,000 Steam wishlists within 3 days of its announcement.
Cat Parents wishlist milestone
The concept is simple and genuinely appealing. You find stray and abandoned cats, clean them up, feed them, and reshape your home to fit a growing clowder. No combat, no timers breathing down your neck. Just cats.
What the devs actually said
Solvita Zacha, CEO of Gaze In Games, posted about the milestone on LinkedIn with a reaction that reads less like a PR statement and more like someone who still can't quite believe it happened. "Three days ago, we finally announced Cat Parents, a game we've been dreaming up and pouring our passion into," she wrote. "A game we'd love to play ourselves, and we never imagined that our little dream would spark interest in so many people."
She followed that up by acknowledging the weight of the response directly: "100,000 wishlists in just three days is absolutely incredible. Those millions of views, and 100,000 wishlists and all expectations are a huge responsibility and a huge trust."
That's a developer who genuinely didn't see this coming. And honestly, that's the most endearing part of the whole story.
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According to SteamDB, Cat Parents is currently sitting between Nocturne and Forgery Craft on the wishlist charts, which puts it in genuinely competitive territory for an unannounced indie sim.
Why the surprise is a little surprising
Here's the thing: the cozy game boom on Steam isn't a secret. Five years of data show it as one of the clearest growth trends on the platform, and cat content specifically has a track record of breaking through. Mewgenics sold 1 million copies in its first week. Multiple cat-adjacent titles have gone viral on social media before they even had release dates.
So the response to Cat Parents isn't shocking from the outside. A small, heartfelt game about rescuing stray cats, built by a team that clearly cares about it, landing in front of an audience that has been asking for exactly this kind of experience? That math adds up.
What surprised me most isn't the numbers. It's that the developers didn't expect them.
The cozy sim formula that keeps working
The core loop described for Cat Parents hits every note the genre rewards:
- Rescuing stray, abandoned, and homeless cats from the streets
- Cleaning and caring for each cat individually
- Feeding and building routines around your growing household
- Customizing your home to accommodate more cats over time
There's no release date confirmed yet, so the wishlist number is doing a lot of work as a signal to the team about what players actually want. Based on the announcement trailer, the visual tone leans warm and soft, which fits exactly what the cozy crowd gravitates toward.
What 100K wishlists actually means for an indie team
For context, 100,000 wishlists in 3 days is a meaningful benchmark. Most indie games never reach that total across their entire pre-release period. It doesn't guarantee sales, but it tells the algorithm that people are paying attention, which affects visibility at launch in real ways.
For a small studio like Gaze In Games, it also means the scope of expectation just changed overnight. Zacha's comment about it being "a huge responsibility" isn't just humility. It's accurate. A game built for a small passionate audience now has a much larger one watching.
The good news is that cozy game players tend to be forgiving of scope and patient with development timelines, provided the core feel is right. The wishlist numbers suggest Cat Parents already has the concept. The execution is what comes next.
No release date has been announced, but the Steam page is live. For more on what's coming to PC this year, check out the latest gaming news at GAMES.GG.
