How many games were on the Commodore 64

It is hard to tell exactly how many games were released on the Commodore 64 since it depends on what definition you have of a game. Here are some possible variations:
- Commercial boxed games sold in the shops
- Commercial home brew games that were sold by mail order only
- Downloadable free games from Bulletin Boards
- Type-ins from magazines and books
- Magazine tapes and disks
- Newly created home brew games that still come out every month

If you take one of the largest databases available on the Internet today, the Gamebase 64, that has 21000 entries there already and this database includes all these types above and in many cases the same game can be found many times but perhaps translated to a different language - even a fair decent lot of Italian bootlegs.

As for unique commercial boxed games a "guesstimate" is between 10000 and 12000 different boxes, this includes all media variations, regions they were released in as well as game compilations. But this excludes unlicensed pirated productions like the ones frequently found in Italy and some other European countries at the time.