Indie game online store Itch.io is facing the same problem that has afflicted a number of major digital storefronts in recent months: AI. Steam’s Next Fest saw more demos than ever, with genAI a significant factor in those numbers. Epic Games can’t help but insist developers be allowed to use AI freely. Alongside them, Itch.io has been facing its own growing issue of AI-generated titles cluttering its service, with the company confirming that the number of games uploaded to the site has as much as doubled in recent months as slop tools become more widespread.
The conversation surrounding Itch.io’s uptick in AI platforms arose after the company posted a graph documenting the number of game pages being created per day on the platform. Between August 3rd and October 30th, this number had roughly doubled from just over 3000 to above 6000 per day. Notably, the company said there was not a similar uptick in downloads and purchases. When one person asked on BlueSky if Itch knew why this was happening, the company replied saying, “Take a guess.”
The number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past 2 months
The company, to its credit, already has a number of policies in place to aid this situation. In response to a particularly damning image of one user taking over almost an entire page of game uploads with near-identical AI-created games, the company confirmed bulk uploads like this are against current content guidelines and actively de-indexed the lot from search.
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