RAWG alternatives: an honest comparison of video game database APIs (2026)

Short version: if you need a large free allowance and don't mind an OAuth step, IGDB is the sensible default. If you need data IGDB doesn't carry — store prices, playtime, review sentiment — or you want plain REST with an API key and no ceremony, that's where GameBrain fits. Building something Steam-only? Use Steam's own API and skip the rest of this page.

Below: what each option costs, how it authenticates, and what each is genuinely best at — including the ones we don't run.

How we compared these APIs.

The options at a glance

Third-party limits and terms change without notice, and we don't control any of the rows above except our own. Confirm the current numbers on each provider's documentation before you build against them — including ours.

IGDB

IGDB is the default recommendation for most hobby projects, and we think that's usually correct. It's free for non-commercial use under the Twitch Developer Service Agreement, the catalog is broad, the metadata model is rich (companies, franchises, game engines, release regions), and it's owned by Twitch. The published rate limit is 4 requests per second.

The two things people trip over: you authenticate through a Twitch app using OAuth client credentials, which feels odd if your project has nothing to do with Twitch and adds a token-refresh step to your code; and queries are written in Apicalypse, a compact custom language posted in the request body rather than ordinary query parameters. Both are one-time costs — budget an afternoon.

What IGDB does not aim to give you is commerce data. There are no live store prices, no cross-shop offers, and no sentiment analysis over player reviews. If your app is a catalog or a wiki, that's fine. If your app is about deciding what to buy or play, you'll be assembling that part yourself.

GameBrain

Ours — here are the numbers so you can check them. GameBrain indexes 800,000+ games across 70+ platforms and is built around "should I play this?" rather than "what exists?". Per game:

• Where to buy and for how much — offers across Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, mobile and cloud stores, with current prices and discounts, in the game-detail response.
• Playtime (median, mean and percentiles from player reports), similar-game recommendations, screenshots, videos and per-game news.
• Review sentiment broken down by aspect — what players consistently praise and complain about, with mention counts. This lives on a separate endpoint (/v1/games/review-box, looked up by Steam app id), not on the main game-detail response, so it currently covers titles that exist on Steam.

Authentication is an API key in a header or query string — no OAuth, no second account. Queries are ordinary REST with query parameters. Paginated endpoints return up to 50 results per call. Uptime is published at status.gamebrain.co.

The free plan is 50 tokens a day for non-commercial projects, with a link back to us. That headline number is lower than IGDB's or RAWG's, and if you plan to hit the API once per page view it will not be enough. It goes a lot further than it looks, though, because the terms let you cache responses for 24 hours and keep our game ids permanently: resolve each game once, store the id, and serve your users from your own cache. A catalogue-shaped app touching a few hundred distinct games settles into a handful of refresh calls a day. An app that genuinely needs live, uncached volume wants a paid plan, and those start at $19/month for 500 tokens a day — worth comparing against IGDB, whose free tier is also non-commercial, so a commercial product needs a licence conversation there rather than a pricing page.

Most calls cost one token; a request that returns 50 results costs five, and autocomplete costs a tenth of one — and you're charged for the results you actually get back, not the page size you asked for. Full breakdown on the docs and pricing page.

RAWG

RAWG built the most approachable game API of the last decade: plain REST, a key in seconds, a free allowance big enough for real projects, and enough tutorials that most questions were already answered on Stack Overflow. If it's up and it fits, keep using it.

The reason most people are reading this page is the multi-day outage in August 2026. The useful lesson from that isn't about RAWG — it's that a free API with no contract is a dependency you don't control. Cache what your terms allow, keep your data-access layer swappable, and know your fallback before you need it. That applies to us too: our status page is status.gamebrain.co, and if you build on GameBrain you should still be able to leave in an afternoon.

Giant Bomb, MobyGames, TheGamesDB and the Steam Web API

Giant Bomb has an editorially curated database with strong console history and video content, behind a free API key with per-resource rate limits. MobyGames is the best source for historical accuracy and credits, especially for older titles, though it isn't designed for high-volume commercial apps. TheGamesDB is community-run and popular with retro and emulator front-ends; metadata is thinner, but the box-art coverage is good and it is genuinely free.

The Steam Web API is worth remembering if — and only if — your app is Steam-shaped. It is the authoritative source for Steam pricing, tags and reviews, it costs nothing, and it will never have data on a PlayStation exclusive or a mobile game. There's also no usable search-by-name endpoint, so most people pair it with one of the databases above rather than using it alone.

Which of these are actually free — and free for what?

This is the question that decides most real projects, and it's usually asked too late. Free tiers here mean free for non-commercial use far more often than they mean free: IGDB's free access is governed by the Twitch Developer Service Agreement, MobyGames gates commercial use, and GameBrain's free plan is non-commercial and requires attribution. "Non-commercial" generally means you're not charging users and not running ads against the data — a donation link is usually fine, but if you're unsure, ask the provider in writing before you build.

Two related things worth checking in any provider's terms before you design your architecture: how long you may cache responses, and whether you may store their data or ids in your own database. These vary a lot, they're rarely on the pricing page, and they determine whether your app can survive its own traffic. Ours are in the API terms.

How to choose

• Hobby project, lots of free calls, catalog data is enough: IGDB.
• You need prices, offers or playtime: GameBrain, or IGDB plus your own scraping (scraping store prices is a permanent maintenance commitment).
• Retro, emulation or historical projects: TheGamesDB or MobyGames.
• Steam-only tool: the Steam Web API directly.
• Commercial product: start with the licence terms, not the feature list. They will narrow the field faster than features do.

Whichever you pick, put a thin adapter between your app and the API — one module that maps the provider's response into your own shape. It's an hour of work, and it turns the next provider change from a week into an afternoon.

How we compared these APIs

Every figure in the table comes from the provider's own documentation or pricing page, linked in the table itself. Where a provider doesn't publish a number — Giant Bomb's per-resource limits, MobyGames' commercial terms — we say "check current terms" rather than guess. GameBrain is our own product and its section is marked as such; its numbers come from our published plans. We re-check this page regularly, and if you spot something out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.

Frequently asked questions