AI projects made up most new itch.io game pages as daily uploads doubled

New game pages on itch.io more than doubled in less than three months, rising from about 3,000 a day in August to more than 6,000 on Oct. 30. The platform indicated that projects made with AI accounted for most of the newly created pages.

“The number of downloads and purchases has not doubled,” itch.io said of the indie-focused storefront, where developers distribute and sell games including student and game-jam projects.

The increase makes hand-crafted games harder to find amid a growing volume of submissions, according to Polygon, which reported the figures after itch.io's late-Oct. 31 Bluesky post. PC Gamer separately described daily new-page totals as regularly exceeding 6,000 by Oct. 30, compared with roughly 3,000 on Aug. 3.

The figures concern recent uploads, rather than the composition of itch.io's whole catalogue. About 131,900 projects were tagged AI Generated among 1.77 million listed projects, or about 7.5%, at the time of the report. That tag depends on developer disclosure: itch.io's Generative AI field asks whether a project contains AI-generated graphics, sound, text and dialogue, or code.

A developer selecting yes automatically receives the AI Generated tag, while a no response generates a No AI tag. Untagged projects containing generative-AI assets are ineligible for indexing on itch.io's browse pages after the platform's stated grace period.

The platform has been adjusting its broader indexing operation while confronting spam and malware. In an October update, itch.io said it had released about 215,000 previously blocked project pages for indexing in one week, taking its indexed total above 2 million, while suspending or banning more than 10,000 accounts attempting to distribute malware and spam. It said classifiers and heuristics screen every published or edited page for cases requiring human review, and that increasingly sophisticated bad actors had made the problem harder in the context of AI and large language models.

Valve has said that cloning predated AI, though the technology had accelerated cloning and trend-following. Its Steam Next Fest demos had grown from around 4,000 to more than 8,000, a separate increase that PC Gamer described as broadly matching the growth in itch.io pages.

AI researcher Mike Cook told PC Gamer that a ban on AI-generated games would not reverse the upload curve, because enforcing it would require either a dedicated team or a difficult public-reporting system.