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It's not just Steam: New game pages created per day on Itch.io has doubled in the last two months, with AI slop the likely culprit

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It's not just Steam: New game pages created per day on Itch.io has doubled in the last two months, with AI slop the likely culprit

It seems it isn't just Steam that's being flooded with AI slop. Indie games storefront itch.io has reported that the number of new game pages being created per day on the site has doubled in the past two months, and just like Valve's much bigger distribution service, the finger is being pointed at AI.

Over on Bluesky, itch.io shared an image of a bar chart labelled "game events". The chart shows that, between August 3 and October 30, the number of new game pages being created per day has risen from around 3,000 to regularly surpassing 6,000. It's a ratio that more or less matches the increase in Steam demos showcased at the most recent Next Fest, which rose from around 4,000 to over 8,000.

While Itch doesn't explicitly point the finger at AI as the cause, it heavily infers it. When Bluesky user Tommy's Homemade Games asked "Do you know why?" Itch responded "take a guess" followed by emojis of a crying face and a robot. Another Bluesky account, BardZaku, asked "is it AI dreck?" to which the account replied with an emoji of a face with bags under its eyes.

The rapid uptick in Itch pages also coincides with the launch of Claude Opus 5, which arrived on July 24. 5—has proved particularly adept at reverse engineering code. This has had a bunch of knock-on effects in various areas of game development, ranging from much faster decompilations of old games, to Steam being flooded with AI slop, and developers cancelling public demos out of concerns their games will be cloned.


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