I’ve always considered life sims as straddling the line between the niche and the mainstream, but I suppose it’s safe to say Inzoi is firmly rocketing the genre into the latter, as it’s officially pouted and peace-signed its way to the number one wishlisted game on Steam.

Krafton’s more ultra-realistic take on The Sims has been ramping up the hype as we approach its release on March 28. This time last week it was sitting in fourth place on the list—behind Elden Ring: Nightreign, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Deadlock—but has now claimed the top spot, which I’d bank on having something to do with the character creator and build mode demos released over the weekend.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many wishlists that actually translates to, since Steam doesn’t actually share that info. SteamDB shows the Inzoi store page having over 240,000 followers, though the demo has only broken around 10,000 concurrent players in the last few days.

It’s interesting to see that the slew of neutral-to-negative takes from a host of content creators and press—including my own not-so-stellar impressions—don’t seem to have made much of a dent in Inzoi’s armour.

Honestly, I get it. For those of us who’ve been playing The Sims for decades (hello!), getting another game attempting to match its scope is practically unheard of. Couple that with some (mostly justifiable) resentment against The Sims and the direction EA seems to be taking with the series, and the promise of a more realistic, in-depth experience from Inzoi has understandably got people pretty darn excited.

Despite the fact I’m not super in love with Inzoi right now, it’s undeniably cool to see a life sim doing Big Numbers on Steam. Even if the only metric at the moment is an invisible number of wishlists. I sincerely hope it translates into sales and people enjoying the game a lot more than I did—like I wrote earlier this month, genre monopolies are bad for everybody, and not-so-gushy feelings about Inzoi aside, I hope we get some much-needed healthy competition in the life sim space.