Here's a chart no storefront wants to see: the number of new game pages created on itch.io every day has doubled in about two months, and the people buying and downloading games haven't kept pace.
itch.io shared the figures on its Bluesky account over the weekend. We couldn't check the original post directly, so what follows relies on how PC Gamer and Aftermath reported it, and each claim is credited to the outlet that reported it.
Why everyone is pointing at AI
PC Gamer says itch.io didn't name a cause outright, though it came close. PC Gamer reports that when one Bluesky user asked "Do you know why?", the account replied "take a guess" with a crying-face emoji and a robot emoji. When another user asked whether it was "AI dreck", the reply was an emoji of a face with bags under its eyes.
Aftermath's Luke Plunkett goes further. He writes that, according to itch.io's later replies, the surge is almost entirely AI-made games flooding the site. He also points to a screenshot posted by Kenney showing the site's "recently added" list, captioned "I didn't filter, this is just 'recently added'". When Plunkett checked the latest releases himself, he says he still found a large number of titles that were clearly AI-generated, or used a lot of AI art, and carried no AI tag.
PC Gamer adds a snapshot of the catalogue: of the 1,769,316 projects listed on itch.io when it wrote its story, 131,929 were tagged AI Generated, about 7.5% of the total. Going by Aftermath's check, not every AI-made game carries that tag.
What itch.io's rules already say
itch.io's rules already cover this. Its content creator quality guidelines tell creators to avoid uploading excessive amounts of automatically generated or AI-generated content and not to "use automated systems to mass produce product pages." The guidelines say itch.io will treat that as spam and may remove such pages from browse and search. Their examples include games "predominantly created by algorithms or AI with minimal human intervention" and multiple near-identical versions of the same generated content.
The same page asks creators to tag generative AI use in each project's AI Disclosure section. It says tagged projects appear on an AI Assisted browse page, and that disclosure is strictly enforced for game asset pages. A page removed from discovery doesn't disappear: the guidelines say it stays reachable through its direct link and the creator's profile, but it's no longer listed.
The trouble is enforcement. Aftermath describes itch.io's AI filter, introduced in 2024, as voluntary. PC Gamer quotes AI researcher Mike Cook, replying to calls for an outright ban: "I think that would be a good move. But it won't change this graph, unfortunately." Cook added: "You need a team of people to enforce it, or a very dicey public reporting system. Even then, it's a lot harder to detect than people think."
Not just itch.io
PC Gamer compares itch.io's jump to Steam, where it says the number of demos at the latest Next Fest rose from around 4,000 to more than 8,000. Aftermath's Plunkett argues there's a strong case for more human moderation on Valve's store, but doubts that's realistic for a platform he calls "relatively tiny" and community-run.
Riley's take: The most telling part here isn't the doubling. It's the reply saying downloads and purchases didn't double with it. A store can survive a flood of new uploads. It struggles when that flood makes it harder to find the games people actually came for. If you browse itch.io for strange little games made by humans, the "recently added" shelf is going to need more digging for a while. itch.io's own rules already point at the fix: tags people actually use, and spam rules that are actually applied.
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