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. The latest iteration of Anthropic’s LLM—which is now at version 5.5—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.
Anthropic has since updated Claude to reign in its ability to directly copy games, but it’s currently hard to tell whether it has stemmed the broader flow of AI generated games. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that AI Generated games now comprise a good portion of the pages listed on Itch. Out of 1,769,316 listed on Itch at the time of writing, 131,929 are tagged as AI Generated, approximately 7.5% of the total. That’s a lot, considering how long AI coding tools have been around.
But to play devil’s advocate, Itch is a storefront that allows AI games, and if people are downloading and enjoying these games, then adding them to the store is fair enough, right? Well, Itch also points out that, although the number of games appearing on Itch per day has doubled, “the number of downloads and purchases has *not* doubled”. This suggests these AI games are clogging up the site for nobody’s benefit, not even the people ‘making’ them.
The question, then, is what’s to be done about all this? The replies to Itch’s initial post are filled with calls to ban AI generated games from the store. But as pointed out by AI researcher Mike Cook, simply banning these games is unlikely to solve the problem.
“I think that would be a good move. But it won’t change this graph, unfortunately,” Cook wrote on Bluesky. “You need a team of people to enforce it, or a very dicey public reporting system. Even then, it’s a lot harder to detect than people think.” Valve has also cast doubt on the efficacy of a ban on AI coding tools for games released on Steam, though its opinion is heavily influenced by the company’s laissez-faire approach to operating its storefront.
Another possibility is to simply let this trend play out. There is a viral element to the ongoing surge in AI generated games, as people post their vibe-coded works online for attention and social media clout. But Itch’s statement suggests that people aren’t properly engaging with most of the games being uploaded.
Hence, it’s possible that the people behind these games may eventually lose interest, moving on to whatever attention-grabbing scheme big tech facilitates next. The risk, of course, is that the audience also loses interest in what these storefronts offer before that happens. After all, nobody wants to wade through a tsunami of slop to get to the games they want to play.
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