Itch.io Sees AI-Generated Game Uploads Double

According to data from the digital gaming platform Itch.io, the number of new game pages created on the site daily has doubled over the past two months. While an average of 3,000 new projects were uploaded daily at the start of August, this figure exceeded 6,000 by the end of October. Statistics suggest that a similar trend is being observed in other major digital stores, including Steam.## The Role of AI in the Gaming Market While the Itch.io administration has not explicitly named artificial intelligence as the sole source of the issue, their reactions on social media leave little doubt. When asked by users if this growth is linked to AI, platform representatives responded with ironic emojis. This surge coincides with the release of Claude Opus 5, which unlocked new capabilities in code generation and reverse engineering. This has led to the mass "cloning" of games and an abundance of products often referred to as "AI slop"—low-quality, artificially generated content.## The Scale and Consequences of the Problem Statistics indicate that there are currently more than 1.7 million games hosted on Itch.io, of which approximately 131,000 are already marked as AI-generated. This accounts for about 7.5% of the total. However, the most concerning fact is that, in parallel with the doubling of game numbers, the rate of downloads and purchases has not changed. This means the platform is being filled with content that real players are not interested in.## What Awaits the Indie Scene? Experts, including AI researcher Mike Cook, believe that a simple ban will not solve the problem. Implementing such a policy would require enormous resources and effective monitoring, which is technically very difficult. It is likely that interest in "viral" AI games will decrease over time as creators move on to new trends. However, the danger lies in the possibility that platforms may lose the trust of their real audience in the meantime. For users searching for high-quality indie games, finding genuinely interesting projects in such a "noisy" environment is becoming increasingly difficult. For gamers and developers, this means that digital store filtering systems will likely become more sophisticated in the near future to ensure users do not miss true masterpieces in a "tsunami" of low-quality content.