Metro 2039 hits 1 million wishlists after reveal, winter launch looms

A million wishlists this fast is not fan-service, it is market signal. For a winter-bound shooter like Metro 2039, that kind of early Steam heat can lift visibility, harden publisher confidence, and set up a launch week that arrives with real commercial weight instead of just franchise goodwill.

Deep Silver and 4A Games revealed the next mainline Metro title on April 16, 2026, and the official Metro account has already said the game passed 1 million wishlists. That pace matters because wishlists are one of the few public metrics that show whether a reveal is just noise or the start of a serious buying cycle. In practical terms, they help keep a game in front of players on Steam, and they usually tell publishers whether a release window has enough oxygen to push beyond the core fanbase.

Metro 2039 is set in post-apocalyptic Moscow in the year 2039, where the last survivors of nuclear war have spent a quarter century fighting in the Metro tunnels beneath a poisoned city. The new story follows the Stranger, a protagonist driven by violent waking nightmares, and introduces the Novoreich, a new faction led by the Fuhrer Hunter. Deep Silver is calling it the darkest Metro story yet, and the pitch is still the one that has carried the series for years: a single-player shooter built around exploration, survival, combat, and stealth rather than a live-service grind.

The scale of the response is easier to understand when you put it next to the franchise’s history. Metro Exodus launched in 2019 and cleared 10 million copies sold worldwide by February 2024. That kind of back catalog matters because it gives a new reveal a ready-made audience, but it also raises the bar. Hitting 1 million wishlists so quickly suggests Metro 2039 is starting its life with much more than curiosity. It is already behaving like one of the bigger PC launches on the horizon.

4A Games has also made clear that the new entry is being developed under conditions shaped by the war in Ukraine. The studio says it was born in Ukraine, remains majority Ukrainian, and now includes teams from more than 25 nationalities. It added that Russia’s full-scale invasion directly shaped the game’s development and themes, while the Metro books were created by Dmitry Glukhovsky, the novelist and outspoken critic of the invasion who lives in exile from Russia. That history gives the series’ bleak Moscow setting a sharper edge than most post-apocalyptic shooters can claim.