The flood of games on itch.io has doubled, but sales have not

Indie game store itch.io reported that the number of game pages created per day has doubled over two months. In the chart the platform published on Bluesky, around 3,000 new pages appeared per day in August, and nearly 8,000 in October.

Revenue did not follow that jump: according to the platform, the growth in the number of pages did not lead to a comparable rise in sales and revenue. A reply under the post specifically clarifies that the number of downloads and purchases has not doubled.

The platform does not name the cause directly

In the post itself, itch.io does not link the surge to generative neural networks, although a site representative hints at it. When users asked about this in the comments, the store's account replied with an emoji of a weary face and robots. In the "newest games" feed, where projects appear in the order they were added, there are noticeably many previews made with generative models.

The scale is visible through the built-in filter. The "No AI" button shrinks the catalog results from 1,772,099 to 432,180 — to roughly a quarter of the previous volume.

Labeling runs on the honor system

The AI Disclosure section appears when creating a project page: the author is asked whether generative models were used in the assets. Answering is not mandatory — the page is published even without an answer. In its content quality rules, itch.io frames this as a request: the platform asks authors to carefully label a project if it contains material created by generative neural networks.

The general rules allow a page to be removed for violating them, but the procedure for cases where generative content is not declared is not described. In practice, this means the tool a buyer could use to screen out the AI flood works exactly as well as the uploaders are honest.

A similar situation on Steam

itch.io is not the only storefront being flooded with hastily assembled AI games. Valve has already commented on the clones that proliferated around Next Fest, and its advice to developers came down to making games "less copyable" and making fuller use of Steam's community features to stand out. The platform left responsibility for visibility with the authors.

The consequences for release planning are already visible: the studio developing the next game after Moonlighter postponed a public playtest over concerns that the project would be copied using neural networks. Openly showing a prototype stops being a harmless marketing practice if a clone can appear in the storefront before the original.

Why open storefronts break first

itch.io was built over the years as a platform without a gatekeeper: anyone can upload a project, and the market itself does the filtering. The model worked as long as the cost of creating a game and a page was measured in weeks of human labor. Generative tools sharply lowered that cost, and the limiter that open access relied on has probably stopped working.

The first mechanisms to break are precisely those once considered an advantage of the indie scene. The new releases feed, sorting by date, jams, tags — all of it assumes that the number of new projects per day is finite. When the flow doubles without the audience growing, the visibility of each individual author falls, and the platform probably incurs additional storage and moderation costs with no matching revenue.

If the trend continues, open storefronts will probably have to choose between two unpleasant solutions: introducing barriers to entry — identity verification, a publishing fee, limits on the number of projects per account — or shifting selection onto curated collections and editorial feeds, which conflicts with the original idea of equal access. Voluntary labeling in its current form looks like a transitional option: it gives the buyer a filter but gives the platform no instrument of enforcement.

For artists and modelers, the takeaway is practical. Betting on organic discovery inside the store is becoming ever less reliable: the traffic the new releases feed used to bring is being diluted. Those who bring an audience from outside — from their own communities, newsletters, devlogs, and social networks — are in a better position; authors whose only promotion channel is the storefront itself are losing out.

What is behind this surge of listings on itch.io — AI generation of asset flips, link farming, the aftermath of the November jams?