I am interested in accessing the data of igdb.com for a hobby project. They have an api that is “free”, ie it requires a twitch account with 2fa enabled which means i would need to hand over my phone number to twitch. That is a hard no from my side.
Anyone know of a way to get a dump of their database or a similar source where i could get api access without revealing personal information? For my project i am after only title, release year, some sort of rating and some sort of playtime.


you could use free temp mail service (there are tons of them) or set up a dedicated private email account for these use cases.
Along with something like (some of these can be blocked on some websites)
Among others.
Ive tried that, but have so far been unable to find a number that has not previously been used for twitch and after a few failed attempts, twitch stops sending out codes.
Ive also experimented with scraping but i am unable to form the request in a way that does not yield 403 for this and howlongtobeat for instance. I did get responses from rawg.io but while it seemed they have a lot of games, stuff like playtime didnt seem too reliable to me (europa univeralis 4 being sub 10hr for example… :p) and ive also yet to find a way to generate all urls to go through all their game pages (urls contain game name, not incremental ids).
The free tier of IGDB has a rate limit of 4 requests per second and they will block you if you try to download the entire database, so this may be a dead end anyway.
Found a 4 megabyte dump that seems promising though it’s from 2018 so outdated.
https://gist.github.com/LeWawan/5858a9e7bef0f3dc4a79ac8bc1e3380c
Another one, a 68MB 3 year old “dataset” for AI training that seems related to IGDB.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/anudeepvanjavakam/igdb-api-data/data
I managed to request 363,020 entries at 500 page size 1 request per second in about 20 minutes, so they don’t seem to be super strict. Though weirdly after I load them into a dict to dedupe the IDs I get 362,969, haven’t looked into what’s going on there.
If you have lycamobile or similar in your country… You can walk into a store and just pick one up for free. In some countries they do have an activation fee, but I think that can be as little as €5 in Europe. Other providers offer similar, and then keep the number for 6 months or activate again.