GameDB

Video game database based on IGDB.

Overview

GameDB is a database of games, platforms, characters, collections, franchises, and videos sourced from IGDB and published as a static JSON API via GitHub Pages. Video metadata is enriched with data from the YouTube API.

The data is intended to be consumed by LizardByte projects such as Sunshine.

Data

The database is updated automatically on a schedule via the update-db workflow. The generated JSON files are published to the gh-pages branch and served at https://app.lizardbyte.dev/GameDB/.

all.json files (e.g. characters/all.json) contain a summary of every item in that category as a single dictionary keyed by ID.

Buckets are used as a lightweight search index for game names. Each bucket file is named after the first two alphanumeric characters of the game name (lowercased), e.g. ha.json for games starting with "Ha" such as Halo. Games whose names contain a space as the second character are put into a bucket named after the first character. Games whose names do not start with two alphanumeric characters are grouped into @.json. Each bucket contains a dictionary of { id: { name } } entries, keeping individual files small for fast lookups.

Optional game title and cover localization

Individual game records retain their original name and may also contain IGDB's game_localizations array. Each localization has a name, an optional cover.url, and a region with an identifier, name, and category. Use the localized cover URL when present, falling back to the game's original cover.url otherwise. IGDB regions can represent a locale or a continent, so the identifier should be used as supplied by IGDB rather than assumed to be a language code. If a game has no localization for the desired region, use its original name.

Localized titles are indexed separately under buckets/localized/<region>/<bucket>.json. The region path component is the lowercased region.identifier. A localized bucket uses the first two Unicode alphanumeric characters of the localized title, lowercased, ignoring punctuation and spaces; titles with no alphanumeric characters use @. Bucket entries keep the familiar { id: { name } } shape, with name set to the localized title. Only games with a title for that region appear in its buckets. To search both translated and original titles, search the selected region's bucket and the original bucket, then deduplicate results by game ID.

The existing game name, bucket URLs, and original bucket contents remain available without selecting a region.

Development

Code contributors can use the Developer Setup guide.