Even with Valve’s replacement of the vote-powered Steam Greenlight with the fee of Steam Direct, making it easier than ever for indie developers to get onto the mammoth online storefront, Itch.io remains an important alternative. If you thought Itch might have suffered in the face of Direct, on the contrary, over 100,000 new projects appeared on the site during 2017, some 68,500 of which were published.
Over the years, Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran has never had qualms about releasing statistics for the site and 2017 was no different.
In a blog post published yesterday, Corcoran revealed some fascinating numbers, including that a whopping 100,864 project pages were created in the last 12 months alone.
Here are some additional figures from Corcoran:
1,646 game jams created, 45,551 people joined them, and 13,361 games were submitted
45,789 builds processed through butler
320,885 files uploaded, totalling 12.5 TB of storage.
202,273 comments and threads made on projects page, communities, and jams.
134,635 new collections created and 764,496 games & projects added to collections282,144 new followers to itch.io accounts
Corcoran also provided a few top 10 lists, such as the most downloaded, tipped and paid-for games. Taking pole position as the most purchased was the Transport Tycoon-inspired Rise of Industry from Dapper Penguin Studios.
Funnily enough, Polytron’s FEZ, originally released in 2012, took out the #3 spot.
When you consider the top three tags for games on Itch.io are “2D”, “arcade” and “pixel art”, the hits here aren’t too surprising.
Still, it’s good to see Itch.io remains as vibrant as ever, even as Valve continues to open Steam up to more and more developers.
itch.io year in review 2017 [Itch.io]
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