THE CRUNCH
Itch.io has begun cracking down on the flood of AI-generated content on its storefront, announcing that it has "deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop" and made it easier for users to filter out games made with generative AI. The move comes a few days after Valve admitted that Steam has a problem with AI slop and game cloning.
The storefront says the number of game pages being created every day has doubled over the past two months, while downloads and purchases have not. Itch.io did not give an official reason for the surge, but when asked on Bluesky it replied "take a guess" alongside crying and robot emojis.
Its guidelines now treat mass-produced pages as spam, covering projects predominantly created by algorithms with minimal human intervention, randomly generated content with no curated design, and multiple AI-generated iterations of essentially the same content. Pages flagged this way may be removed from browse and search listings.
Disclosure rules are also being tightened: the generative AI disclosure, previously required only for game assets for the past two years, now extends to the tabletop, books, comics and soundtracks categories, and new filters let users exclude some or all use of generative AI. There is also a dedicated "No AI" tag page.
As PC Gamer's commentary notes, the action is unlikely to stem the wider tide, given Itch.io's small share of a market dominated by Steam and the sheer ease of churning out AI content. But purging the worst offenders and giving gamers tools to avoid the mess is, at minimum, something.