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 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. That being said, Itch states this is not the main cause of the issue: according to Itch, “the increase in the graph is driven by first time uploaders, not bulk uploaders like this.”
Itch noted in another social media post that they were “sad” that the current offers to host content were being abused. In response, the store has already begun to implement new policies, now requiring all uploads in the tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks categories comply with AI disclosures already implemented elsewhere, instructing users to state if these tools have been used, and in what ways. Notably, this is necessary even if the results were edited later.
Moderation is also increasing. The company has deleted “a couple terabytes” of AI slop, and is adding a user filter for games with generative AI disclosure filtering—those who don’t wish to see games using these tools won’t have them appear in search.
Is it enough? Some people have responded to Itch.io’s posting throughout the last few days asking why it doesn’t just entirely ban AI content, considering the platform is designed specifically for solo and hobbyist creators. A filtering system won’t please those people. However, the costs of moderation to find and remove such content would be high if such a policy were implemented, while some in programming fields see AI’s use in coding, even if not art, as acceptable.
