Backlog Update: How many games do I have to play?

April 20, 2026

As I mentioned in a previous post I thought I had 1999 games to play off of my itch.io bundles but is that number accurate at all? Here are some of the numbers...

This would add up to 2516 games to play, but I knew there were many repeats and assumed it was closer to 1999 games (2000 minus Night in the Woods which I already owned), I would get the actual number once I put them all in an itch.io Collection, where the plan was to go through all games in all bundles and put them in one list so that I could avoid repeats and not accidentally replay games I had already played.

Counting Night in the Woods as well as the few games I had already played off of the bundle the grand total was... 1987! 1987 unique games but here's where the real question begins, is that number exactly accurate?

The first bundle said 1102 games, but 7 of the games listed were dead, having been removed from itch.io but still present in the list because that's how it works, teasing you with what they've taken away from you, which I don't mind because that's exactly how I was able to find a mirror of a piece of software that was included (Software, not game) a while back. So the original list is down to 1095 games, no repeats due to being the first.

The second bundle said 847 games (OR DID IT? Foreshadowing), this one had 5 dead games, so excluding those games and the repeats the total of new games was 600, nice round number.

The third bundle was much smaller than the first, which my exhausted brain was thankful for, "the last list is shorter thank fucking god," it said 567 games, but being the last it had to be compared with the first and second bundles, it introduced 292 new games, nice, with 6 dead games. It's barely over half of the number of games. However it's worth noting that both this bundle and the first one were organized by itch.io so it's possible that it has more overlap with the first than with the second, which was completely independent (and also earned much less). But I wouldn't know this due to my method, comparing their contents isn't what I'm here for and figuring out a way to automatically check is not worth the time right now, but anecdotally I did see various games present in the second and third but not first bundle.

Due to my method and how itch.io Collections work I'll actually end up getting through that last bundle first, meaning I'll start with the shortest and build up to the biggest. itch.io Collection organizing still sucks and will probably suck for a while until anyone actually cares enough to nag them about it and for them to care enough to change it.

Among the dead games there seems to be no repeat, there's 3 games by the same creator in the same bundle whose account is very much alive, in fact the accounts for most of these games are alive and well, only a few were completely removed, who knows why they removed the games, each case must be special specially considering each of them was a different person (Minus those 3 by the same one).

BUT HERE'S THE THING.

I never stopped to think about how the "THE" is placed exactly to be the dot on the i, kinda clever.

Foreshadowing in action: The Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid did not end up having 847 games, when I was adding the games to the collection it said 846 which was very odd, I could have made a typo which is sometihng I never do. So I checked Wayback Machine to see if it could have been that one of the games was removed entirely, something that up until now was unheard of for me, given that deleted games and even deleted games by deleted accounts still appear on the list, and in fact, I checked back to October 2025, a couple of weeks before I made that post and it did in fact say 847, not 846 as it currently does, so what happened?

The obvious thing to do first was to check what these bundles looked like when they first launched and compare the number changes, I picked the Bundle for Ukraine first and noticed this:

Original:

Current:

The thing that I immediately noticed, apart from the decrease in Games was the increase in Tools, Wayback archives usually break in silly ways but luckily this page was well archived, I compared the Tools and got this:


As you can see the Hakuen plugins were added to Tools, but that's not all, the Hakuen plugins were initially tagged as Game assets, you yourself decide what your product is marked as, meaning that at any point you can move this thing around, so even though we only saw Game assets go from 51 to 50 here's an example of it dropping by 3 at some point since Hakuen was moved.

But what's more interesting is that I compared with the first day of the bundle being public and the other new tool which is Prata: Dialogs in seconds seemed to be completely absent, fast forwarding a month, it was there. It's a possibility that it had a completely different name at the start (For whatever reason) but that's when I stopped to look at the total numbers, we know that each piece of software can move around but Prata is an example of something that was nowhere so...

On day one of the bundle being public there were 991 items. A month later (once the sale period had ended) 998, in the present day that's still 998 items. Which makes sense, as far as I know you can always add stuff to a bundle even after it's gone live and I'm almost sure you can't remove them? I suppose I could try to verify that manually but eh, as far as I recall from bundles I've participated in or ran myself I think they don't let you, THANKFULLY.

So circling back to 847 games becoming 846, when I was adding these games to my collection I did notice that some of these "Games" looked more like Books or Tools, but due to the process I couldn't just afford to stop and look every time, specially because in the ambiguity of how varied games are sometimes, it could require taking a big big close look, instead I'll just do that when I stumble upon them when clearing the Collection as I play through, but this already confirms that some games were mistagged and some STILL are mistagged, but that's okay, I'll just ignore them when the time comes.

But there's something that is pre-triggering my OCD and it's the fact that while most software retagging will be from Games to other stuff like Books or Tools, there's always the slight chance that a non-Games becomes Games and I would never know, or rather, I would know due to the number change but I wouldn't be able to find it, it's severely unlikely but given that it'll take me a long ass time to get through these games it's always possible that at SOME POINT it happens.

I suppose that if that does end up happening where the number changes then I simply shall make a script that compares the list of the then-present to the current present where I compiled the list. I mentioned that doing something like that wasn't worth it right now but it'll surely be worth it years in the future when I get through this list, I gotta make things right, make it the way it's supposed to be.

That's the whole big point of this post, that I have an insane obsession with trying every game here and the idea of any games slipping is as of now, horrifying. I can predict that once I get through some of the bad games I'll be less excited to try absolutely everything, but right now that thing...

I'm already trying to figure out what I'll do about those deleted games, but the truth is that it's low priority, most of the devs are active and I can email them like yo what's up, but I should play the games that are still up first before I begin to worry too much about them, or else I'll end up with more deleted games. Insane flaw in the way itch.io works, under no circumstances should devs just be able to pull out paid software and leave buyers unable to download it, somebody once told me that if you had already downloaded the software you should be able to access it from your library but here's the thing, if you buy a bundle those items do not show up automatically in your library, no, they only appear once you've downloaded them once; assuming "if you've downloaded you can redownload" is even true, which I'm at least hoping it is.

In the grand scheme of things these are 18 games I have no access to out of 1987 I do but if I bought a bundle from a single creator and then all I bought from them was gone because they deleted their account the itch.io staff wouldn't live to hear the end of it LOL. And that's the principle, it's not these 18 lost games it's the fact that they can just delete anything and take your access away #StopKillingGames #IfBuyingIsntOwningPiracyIsntStealing.

There was one game that was a whole journey of its own to track, the creator not only deleted it but they changed the title, removed the image, deleted the description, and changed the link as well, the only remaining thing of this whole ordeal was their profile which mentioned a voxel tool and nothing else, apparently soon after the bundle went live, like a couple months afterwards, they deleted everything from their profile, they even moved the category from Games to Misc so I thought the removed item was the tool they mention in their profile, the creator is cool with forks and reuploads because it was open source but that raises the question even further for why delete the original source then? But that's beside the point, looking at an archive of the bundle I wasn't able to spot this tool's name so I looked at the archive of the user's profile, it turned out that the deleted item was a pretty cute looking game, a confusing situation because the game's trailer was uploaded by itch.io so I'm left wondering if it was some sort of official collaboration? This cute game is shrouded in mystery.

Ultimately I was able to find a mirror in the Internet Archive so that was the end of that, I'll play it at some point I guess.

I'll always understand it when people no longer want one of their works online, like sometimes people have an old project up and they now find it cringe, but things change a little when it's paid software, that people paid for. In my case I don't care because it's one among thousands but what about anyone that actually paid for it intending to play it? Even if you want to hide it from the public so that no new people buy it it should remain accessible to those who did. But really is it the dev's fault that an app that should be in people's libraries is not there?

It's itch.io's, it was always itch.io's fault, for everything. Look at my indie marketplace man we're not gonna make it bruh. 😭

AFAIK currently the "solution" for people who don't want their works accessible to new buyers is to delist the game page, so that anyone who already owns the software can download it there, but that's not how it should work, it should be in people's libraries.

Ultimately I'm aware of how hard it is to maintain a website like itch.io and that the devs aren't precisely rich and can throw money at all the issues it has and solve them, that's what people from last year during the Collective Shout culling thought, but not the reality. Still it doesn't mean I can't dream of a better website.

Speaking of Collective Shout, they're directly responsible for at least one of these games being dead. Or at least partially, that's still on itch.io's end for bending the knee. Sigh, *dreams of a better website.*

I'm still thankful for the wonderful parts of it, like these 1987 games, or 1986 considering I had already played Night in the Woods.

So that's where I'm at now, 1987 games in my collection, 3 of which I've already completed and a couple more I have tried, the thing is I couldn't discriminate on that when making the list. Because I had to dig through over 2000 games and I wasn't about to pause 'cause "Ooh I already played that one!" No, same reason I couldn't pause when something looked like a book; the next move is look at this list of games I already played/am playing and then remove them from this collection, then I'll just start playing starting from the most recently added AKA the bottom games from the last bundle.

Now that the pre-preparing and the pre-pre-preparing is done, it's time to actually tackle the backlog? Wish me luck.