The invisible million

Ask which storefront holds the most games and everybody says Steam. Steam will ship around 24,000 games this year, which is a lot.

itch.io holds 1,021,562.

It launched on 3 March 2013, it is run by a very small team, and outside the people who use it almost nobody can tell you a single number about it. This is an attempt at the numbers.

The growth

That is 13× between mid-2015 and late 2019, then another 5.1× over the following six and a half years. The percentages fall, as they must at that size, but the absolute additions keep climbing: roughly 820,000 games added since November 2019, at a current rate of about 400 a day.

Four hundred a day is around 146,000 a year. Steam, at its 2026 pace, ships about 24,000.

itch.io adds six games for every one that reaches Steam.

The number that changes the picture

itch.io reports that 538,448 games have been created for jams hosted on the platform. In March 2023 that figure was around 259,000.

Set it against the catalogue:

538,448 of 1,021,562. More than half of everything on itch.io was made for a game jam.

We have not seen that ratio published anywhere, and it reframes what the site is. A storefront is a place where finished products are sold. itch.io is mostly a record of an event: a weekend, a theme, a deadline, a thing that exists because someone had 48 hours and a prompt.

It also doubled in three and a half years, which makes jam output the fastest-moving part of the fastest-moving catalogue in games.

That has a consequence for anyone trying to measure the medium. Half of this million was never intended as a product, so measuring it with product metrics, revenue, reviews, wishlists, will report approximately zero and conclude that nothing is there. Something is very much there. It is just not a shop.

Why no database sees it

The serious games databases are all built around store entries. RAWG covers over 350,000 titles across fifty-plus platforms and is the largest of them. MobyGames has been curating since 1999 and is the most careful.

itch.io alone holds roughly three times RAWG's entire catalogue.

The reason it stays invisible is structural, not lazy. A game on itch.io may have no price, no release date in any conventional sense, no platform in the store sense, and it may run in a browser tab and never be installed. Every field a games database is built to hold is optional here. So the entry does not fail to be indexed. It fails to be an entry.

The economics nobody copies

Since March 2015 itch.io has run open revenue sharing: the split is set by the developer. The default is 10 percent and it can be moved anywhere from zero to a hundred.

The industry standard is 30 percent. Steam, the App Store and Google Play all take roughly that.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly. Pay-what-you-want buyers pay about 30 percent above the stated minimum on average, so the trust runs in both directions. And several times a year Creator Day waives the platform fee entirely.

A platform that can be exploited and is not becomes the one people pick when nobody is making them.

What a million games actually means

Numbers this size stop meaning anything, so here is one that does.

Spend ten seconds looking at each game on itch.io. Not playing it, just looking at the page long enough to decide.

That is 10,215,620 seconds. 118 days, without sleeping, to glance once at each.

At a more human pace, an hour a day, it takes seven years and nine months to look at the catalogue as it stands today. And you never finish, because it keeps growing while you look.

An hour a day gets you through 360 games. Four hundred arrive. You need one hour and seven minutes a day just to break even, and every minute under that is ground you never make up.

(Our calculation. Ten seconds per game is an assumption, stated so you can disagree with the assumption rather than the arithmetic.)

What we take from it

Three things.

The biggest catalogue in games is not a storefront, and the measurement tools of the industry are pointed at storefronts. Anyone claiming to know how many games exist is quoting Steam and rounding the rest to zero.

Half of it is jam output, which means the dominant production mode in this part of the medium is a deadline and a theme, not a business plan. Judge it as commerce and you will conclude it is worthless. Judge it as culture and it is the most productive thing happening.

Discovery here is genuinely unsolved. Steam at least has charts and a queue built for the problem. A million items with no price, no publisher and no reviews defeats every ranking mechanism that assumes those exist. That is a gap, and it is the one we are building into.

Sources

• itch.io launch date 3 March 2013; itch.io released games listing for the current catalogue count
• itch.io growth figures for June 2015 and the 200,000 milestone of November 2019, as reported at the time by PC Games Insider and in itch.io's own history
• itch.io jam totals: approximately 259,000 as of March 2023, 538,448 in 2026
• itch.io, "Introducing open revenue sharing" (March 2015) and itch.io documentation on Creator Day and pay-what-you-want
• RAWG API documentation for the 350,000-plus catalogue size
• Daily upload rate of about 400 games from itch.io's "Thank You Itch" bundle page, February 2026

Retrieved 4 August 2026. ⚠️ itch.io refuses automated access (HTTP 403 on our request), so the catalogue and jam counts here come from published summaries rather than from our own reading of the site. That makes them the weakest figures in this piece, and we would rather say so than present them as measured. Getting them first-hand needs a proper agreement with itch.io, not a scraper.