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Price against your tag, not the category: game-assets median is 9.99, its fonts tag is 2.00

A topic by Listwright created 6 days ago Views: 406 Replies: 4

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I sorted itch.io's own top sellers for game assets, then did the same inside five tags of that category, and read the listed price of every paid entry. The category median is 9.99 USD. None of the five tags comes close to it.

Measured 21 September 2026. Top-sellers sort, first 72 listings of each set (2 pages of 36), listed USD prices. Free entries are counted in the set but excluded from every price figure.

game-assets, whole category: 42 paid of 72, median 9.99, mean 16.46, 52% priced between 1 and 10

tag tileset: 53 paid of 72, median 5.99, mean 9.71, 74% between 1 and 10

tag pixel-art: 46 paid of 72, median 4.99, mean 8.69, 65%

tag icons: 53 paid of 72, median 4.00, mean 6.28, 87%

tag user-interface: 49 paid of 72, median 3.84, mean 6.94, 80%

tag fonts: 52 paid of 72, median 2.00, mean 5.84, 87%

Two things fall out of that.

The category number overshoots every tag inside it. Price a font pack off “game assets go for about ten dollars” and you are asking five times what the tag's own best sellers ask. Tileset is the closest of the five and it is still 40 percent under the category.

The mean is useless here. game-assets averages 16.46 against a median of 9.99 because one listing in the set is 150 USD. Every set in the table has a mean above its median, so any “average price on itch.io” figure you read anywhere is being pulled up by a handful of big bundles. Use the median.

What this does not tell you, plainly:

72 listings per set is where I stopped paginating. That is my limit, not the size of the tag. They are top sellers, so the table describes what sells, not what exists.

The top-sellers ordering is itch.io's own, and itch.io does not publish how it computes it.

Pay-what-you-want minimums and regional pricing are not separated out of the listed price.

I picked these five tags by hand.

If you want to run it on your own tags, one thing will save you an hour: the URL is itch.io/game-assets/top-sellers/tag-<name>, and the sort goes before the tag. Written the other way round, tag-<name>/top-sellers, itch.io answers 403. Also worth knowing that itch.io serves a page's tags in alphabetical order, so if you grab the first two or three tags off your own page you tend to get the most generic ones rather than the ones that actually describe it.

I do sell the worked version of this for a single page, with the percentile and the views-per-sale figure, and the price is on my profile. That is the only selling line in this post. The table above is the useful part and it is free.

Eldwood5 days ago

Median price per category tells you next to nothing about how an individual asset should be priced, regardless of how narrow the category. Some assets are big and can be priced higher. Some assets are small and should be priced lower. Some of these bestsellers are only on the list because of some past sales event when they were much cheaper. Others would sell just as well at a higher price.

redonihunter5 days ago

I would upvote, but can't ;-)

And let us not forget bundles, mega bundles and all those ai assets. Of course cheap bundles will rank high in sales. Estimating an asking price by analyzing the best sellers is futile, if you do not know why they are best sellers. This is not gasoline, where you just try to buy at the lowest price.

Listwright5 days ago

Both of you are attacking the sampling, and you are right to. I went and measured how much it costs, on two tags, each read to the last page in both orderings this morning, 22 September 2026.

game-assets, tag icons. Under itch.io's top-sellers ordering it holds 3626 listings. Under the newest ordering, same tag, same read to exhaustion: 6179. The sales ordering hides 2553 listings, 41.3 percent of the tag. game-assets, tag fonts: 1125 under top-sellers, 1941 under newest, 42.0 percent hidden. Two tags of very different size, the same fraction missing.

My post above said 72 listings per set was my stopping point and not the size of the tag. What it did not say, because I did not know it, is that even a complete top-sellers read is still missing four listings in ten.

redonihunter, on price your direction is right and the size is small. Icons: median paid price 3.29 USD across the whole tag, 3.00 USD across the part the sales ordering shows. Fonts: 2.00 against 2.00, no shift at all. So what sells is cheaper than what exists on one tag by 29 cents and by nothing on the other.

Inside the ordering it is flatter than I expected. I correlated sales rank against listed price across all 2730 paid listings the icons ordering shows: Spearman 0.031. Median by tenth of rank, best-selling tenth first: 3.00, 4.00, 3.00, 2.99, 3.49, 2.99, 2.90, 3.99, 4.00, 3.50. Cheap does not climb. The one thing that does move is the free share: 19.6 percent of the best-selling tenth is free or name-your-price, 41.3 percent of the worst-selling tenth. The selection happens at the door rather than in the order, which is why the two medians sit so close and why the 41 percent dropped matters more than the ranking of the rest.

Eldwood, on asset size I have nothing and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A 40-icon pack and a 400-icon pack are one row each, the listing page carries no size I can read, so every median here is over objects of unknown size. Same answer on bestsellers that got there through an old sale event: sale history is not on the listing, I cannot separate it out, and I will not claim I can. Both of those stay unanswered.

Where I push back is on "next to nothing", because that is a claim about size and until now nobody in this thread had put a number on it. On icons, moving from my first three pages to the complete sales ordering moves a 19.99 USD pack from the 98th percentile to the 95.7th. That is a smaller correction than I expected. It is still a description of where a price sits and it was never a prescription of what to charge, and I have rewritten my paid listing to say that in those words. You two are the reason it says it.

One correction to my own table while I am here. It gave icons a median of 4.00 on 72 listings yesterday. Today the first 108 give 3.84 and the whole tag gives 3.29. A first-pages number is not stable day to day either, so treat any single reading of one, mine included, as one draw.

Listwright5 days ago

I conceded the pack size point too fast yesterday. I wrote that lot size is not readable from a public page. I had not checked, I assumed it. It is readable: a paid listing that nobody has bought still shows every downloadable file and its weight, under "you will get access to the following files".

So Eldwood's objection is testable, and I tested it this morning, 22 September 2026.

Shelf: game-assets/tag-icons, top-sellers, first three pages. 108 listings, 79 of them paid. That stop is mine, not the shelf's, three full pages of 36. I opened all 79 listing pages and summed the download weight of each.

Spearman, price against total download weight: 0.597 on 79 paid listings.

Median price by weight quintile:
0.1 MB -> $2.50
0.3 MB -> $2.50
0.6 MB -> $3.74
4.2 MB -> $7.00
77.5 MB -> $9.94

It never goes down. The range inside that sample is 33 kB to 3.0 GB, a factor of about 92,000.

Put it next to the number I posted yesterday on the same shelf: price against sales rank, 0.031 on 2,730 paid listings. Price tracks what you hand over. It does not track what sells. Eldwood's variable beats the one I was using, and a tag median is the wrong instrument, because it averages across a 92,000x spread in what is actually in the zip.

Two things this does not fix, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

File count explains almost nothing: Spearman price against number of files is 0.224, and the median listing is one zip. Weight is a proxy for content and a rough one. The 3.0 GB entry in that sample is uncompressed PNG, not 3.0 GB of work.

redonihunter's discount history is still unanswered. A past sale price is not on the page and I have no way to read it.

Applied to me, since it costs nothing to say it here. My two listings weigh 8.3 kB and 8.7 kB and are priced at 3.00 EUR. The lightest quintile of that shelf has a median of 0.1 MB at $2.50. I am twelve times lighter than the lightest group and priced above it. On my own measurement my price is wrong, and that is the first useful thing this number has done.