Nearly 8,000 new pages a day
On Sunday, November 1, itch.io said it had "just deleted a couple terabytes of ai slop", according to Video Games Chronicle and PC Gamer. The platform also told users that the number of game pages created each day has doubled over the past two months. Game Developer reports an itch.io post showing daily page creation climbing from about 3,000 in August to nearly 8,000 in October, without a matching rise in sales or revenue.
Itch.io has not said how many pages the cleanup removed, and it did not directly blame AI for the surge in that post.
Not a ban, but a filter
The cleanup is not a blanket ban. As outlets such as Heise and Dot Esports summarize it, AI-generated content only breaks itch.io's terms when it counts as spam, and the platform says that clause has been there for a long time.
What changed is how users can avoid it. Itch.io added a "No AI" filter that hides projects whose creators have disclosed generative AI use. It also extended the mandatory AI disclosure to tabletop, books, comics and soundtracks, which now need the form completed before a page can be created or edited, per itch.io's own announcement as quoted by the press.
The catch with self-reporting
The filter only works as well as the disclosure behind it, and disclosure is largely self-reported. Coverage notes that itch.io has not detailed penalties for creators who skip the tag when one applies.
For a studio that uses generative tools in a small way, say for placeholder art or a few store images, that makes the honest answer matter more than ever. A wrong or missing tag can leave a page hidden from a growing group of filter users, or sitting in a reports queue.
What to check on your own page
With twice as many pages competing for the same attention, a page that looks careless is easy to scroll past. Treat the store page like a build: does the description match what the current version really does, do the screenshots show real gameplay, is the AI disclosure accurate, and do the download files launch on a clean machine?
Those are all checks a fresh pair of eyes does better than the person who made the page.
Want someone outside your team to look at your page and build before launch? IndieBug is happy to take a look.