Gamedev.js Jam 2026, the seventh yearly edition of the online web game development competition, ended up with 495 entries – that’s more than in the previous year, another year in a row!
In the 2025 edition we had 4614 developers participating on Itch who submitted 420 games, which is a solid 9% rate. This year, with 2782 developers and 495 games that doubled and jumped to almost 18%! Looking at the past years where that rate was around 5% you could imagine building games and releasing them is as easy as ever.
Check out all the entries following the Machines theme directly on Itch: itch.io/jam/gamedevjs-2026/entries
Thank you all for participating! Make sure to play and rate as many games as you can, and provide constructive feedback to your fellow devs, as Karma on Itch (a reputation system where your game’s visibility increases when you rate and comment on other participants’ entries) is still in place. After all the overall winners will be based on YOUR votes!
As always, the voting will end on May 9th, with the overall winners being announced the next day on May 10th, and results of the extra challenges (picked by dedicated experts) will be published on May 11th.
It seems the challenges this year were incredibly popular, as more participants joined them than ever before in the past:
- Open Source by GitHub (216 games, up from 122)
- Build it with Phaser (95, up from 68)
- YouTube Playables (109)
- Deploy to Wavedash (181)
- Ethereum by OP Guild (15)
There might still be a few false positives as the data is based on developers marking the checkboxes themselves, but those numbers are still quite impressive nonetheless.
YouTube Playables interest form
Thanks everyone who participated in the YouTube Playables challenge. If you are interested in developing a game for YouTube Playables, head to this link to submit your interest. This is available for developers globally regardless if you participated in the YouTube Playables challenge or not.
Wavedash challenge extended
That said, those numbers can still be improved. We’ve heard some of you had issues uploading your entry to Wavedash (with the $2500 prize pool), and so if you submitted to the Wavedash challenge on Itch, but don’t have the game published on the Wavedash platform yet, you can still do it – the extended deadline is end of this week, Sunday May 3rd 2026, end of day your time.
Top comments (0)