In 2024, when the specter of AI “created” video games was still in its infancy, independent platform itch.io decided that the best it could do to combat this growing threat was, as Valve did with Steam, establish a voluntary “AI” filter when adding new projects to the site. By November 2026, as the itch collapses under the weight of new AI-generated “games” pouring into the site, this filter proves to be as sturdy as a wet paper bag.
To give you an idea of how many AI-generated “games” have been published on the site in recent months, itch’s social media accounts posted the following over the weekend:
The number of game pages created each day has doubled in the last 2 months
– itch.io (@itch.io) 2026-11-01T03:51:29.867Z
The post was not written without a broader argument; as the account said in some later replies, the surge is almost entirely due to the AI-created garbage race on the platform, as popularity of ambient-coded theft, copycats and machine-made trash explodes.
To illustrate what this “doubling” looks like, look at this vision of hell:
I didn’t filter, it’s just “recently added”
— Kenney (@kenney.nl) 2026-11-01T09:36:34.926Z
Storefronts are flooded with this crap, making it a terrible user experience for customers. And while in Valve’s case there is a compelling case for stronger human moderation of the store, I’m not sure that’s a viable option for a relatively small, community-run platform like itch.
Although Kenney’s screenshot above is an extreme example (and does not use the AI filter), at the time of writing this article I visited the latest releases section and there were still a large number of clearly AI-generated titles (or titles that heavily use AI in their visual assets) that did not use itch’s voluntary tag system.
The problem here is not that these games make money. say themselves in a response that if the number of projects listed has doubled, “the number of downloads and purchases has not“–is that the failure to combat this wave makes the site worse for every person who uses it. It becomes harder to find real games, for example, and it also makes the storefront look like a clearance stand.
Or, as this user said in response to itch’s original post:
why are you letting discovery on your site become unusable for the benefit of absolutely no one
– internet scammer (@auxchamp.bsky.social) 2026-11-01T20:10:21.238Z
Gn tech
