Back in 2024, when the spectre of AI-‘created’ video games was still in its infancy, indie platform itch.io decided that the best it could do to combat this growing threat was, like Valve has done with Steam, institute a voluntary ‘AI’ filter when adding new projects to the site. By November 2026, as itch buckles under the weight of new AI-generated ‘games’ pouring onto the site, that filter is proving about as robust as a wet paper bag.
To give you an idea of how many AI-generated ‘games’ have been dumped onto the site in recent months, itch’s social media accounts posted the following over the weekend:
The number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past 2 months
The post wasn’t made without a wider point; as the account has said in some subsequent replies, the surge has been almost entirely down to AI-created garbage racing onto the platform asthe popularity of vibe-coded theft, copycats and machine-built slop explodes.
To illustrate what this “doubling” looks like, check out this vision of hell:
I didn’t filter, this is just “recently added”
Shopfronts are being deluged by this shit, and it’s making it a terrible user experience for customers. And while in Valve’s case there’s a compelling case for stronger human moderation of the store, I’m not sure that’s ae itch
While Kenney’s screenshot above is an extreme example (and isn’t making use of the AI filter), at time of writing I visited the latest releases section and there was still a huge number of clearly AI-generated titles (or titles making extensive use of AI in their visual assets) which made no use of itch’s voluntary tag system.
The issue here isn’t that these games are making money–itchthemselves say in a reply that while the number of projects listed has doubled, “the number of downloads and purchases has not“–it’s that an inability to combat this surge makes the site worse for every single person using it. It gets harder to find real games, for example, and it also makes the shopfront look like a clearance rack.
Or, as this user put it replying to itch’s original post:
why are you letting discovery on your site become unusable for the benefit of absolutely nobody
— internet scamp (@auxchamp.bsky.social)2026-11-01T20:10:21.238Z
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