Method
How we count hands.
Hands is the number of people we can show built a game. It is published with its evidence attached so you can check the reasoning instead of taking the number on faith.
Hands is not a score. It says nothing about whether a game is good, and a smaller number is not a better number. It exists to explain the shape of a game: why the localisation is thin, why the interface has one strange corner, why a build stopped getting updates in 2019.
The four sources
S1. The store developer account
How many apps sit under the account, and what the account is called. An account named after a person, holding one app, is a strong hint. An account holding forty apps under a brand name is a different kind of operation. On its own this is never enough, but it corroborates well.
S2. The App Store seller field
Apple prints the legal seller of record. "Evan Debenham" is an individual selling under his own name. "Sirvo LLC" or "EightyEight Games LTD" tells you a registered company exists, which is a tax and liability decision, not a headcount. Plenty of solo developers incorporate. Treating a company name as evidence of a team is the most common mistake in this kind of counting, and we do not make it.
S3. The developer's own published words
An about page, a devlog, a press kit, a post-mortem. This is the strongest source we have, because it is first-hand and because a developer who states their team size in writing is accountable for it. Shattered Pixel's about page saying the studio name is a trade name for one person is worth more than any amount of secondary coverage.
S4. Independent interviews
Two or more outlets, published at different times, independently describing the same crew. One interview is effectively a press release with a byline attached. Two, years apart, from unrelated publications, is evidence.
What counts as confirmed
- Confirmed
- Two or more sources agree, and at least one is S3 or S4. The card shows a plain number.
- Partly confirmed
- We can name the people but cannot pin down who did what, or the developer's own description and the company structure point at slightly different counts. The card shows a range, such as 1 to 2, and says why. Tiny Bubbles is the example on this site.
- Not confirmed
- The trail runs out. The card prints "not confirmed" and the chart draws a gap. We do not average two guesses into a third number, and we do not quietly drop a row because it looks untidy.
Where the method fails
- Uncredited help is invisible. A contract composer, an artist paid for one weekend, a partner doing QA on the sofa. None of it reaches a store listing. Hands counts credited, verified builders, not everyone who ever touched the project.
- Aggregated search summaries are not sources. They cite each other and drift. During this issue several of them told us a developer holds a particular nationality; we could not find it in his own words or in any reference we trust, so it is not on the site.
- Development time is rarely published. Two of four builds here have no verifiable start date. That is why the credits board has dashed bars on it.
- Store facts expire. Prices, ratings and update dates move. Everything on this site carries the date it was checked, currently 20 July 2026, and the Canadian storefront it came from.
How the store numbers are handled
- Ratings are the store's, never ours, and always printed with the platform and the number of ratings behind them. Canadian sample sizes on this site run from 230 to 390, which is small enough that a difference of two tenths of a star means very little.
- Prices are in Canadian dollars from the Canadian storefronts. Where the two platforms disagree, both are printed with the date rather than one being picked for tidiness.
- Install size is iOS only. Google Play does not publish a size on its web listing, so we leave it blank rather than estimate.
- Monetisation is described per platform, because the same game is regularly free with ads on one store and paid and clean on the other.
What gets excluded before counting starts
Games carrying a simulated gambling or loot box advisory do not get a card here, however good the solo story behind them is. Neither do 18+ or shock content titles. That rule has no exceptions, and when it costs us a good entry, the FAQ on the front page says which one and why.