Itch.io Says New Game Pages Doubled in Two Months but Downloads Did Not

Itch.io just posted a chart that every indie developer will recognise as a nightmare. The number of new game pages created on the store each day has doubled in two months. The number of people downloading or buying games has not.

The store shared the data in a Bluesky post late on October 31. According to the bar chart, which PC Gamer describes as showing "game events," daily new pages climbed from around 3,000 on August 3 to regularly more than 6,000 by October 30. Itch.io did not publish the underlying dataset, so those figures come from reading the graph.

The kicker came in the same post. "The number of downloads and purchases has not doubled," itch.io wrote, with a smiling-through-tears emoji. Twice as many games are fighting for roughly the same audience.

Itch.io says "take a guess"

The company never wrote the words "AI-generated." When one Bluesky user asked whether it knew why pages had doubled, itch.io replied with "take a guess" and a crying face next to a robot. Asked by another account whether it was "AI dreck," it answered with a tired-face emoji. Polygon reports that other replies from the account indicate AI projects make up the majority of the new pages, though I could not find a number from itch.io itself.

"I think that would be a good move. But it won't change this graph, unfortunately." Mike Cook, AI researcher, on banning AI-generated games

Cook, writing on Bluesky as quoted by PC Gamer, said enforcement would need "a team of people" or "a very dicey public reporting system," and that AI use is "a lot harder to detect than people think." That is the uncomfortable part. Many replies demand an outright ban, but a ban is only as good as the ability to spot what it bans.

What does exist is self-reporting. Itch.io asks creators to tag generative AI use, and its quality guidelines say that using automated systems to mass-produce product pages counts as spam that can get pages pulled from browse and search. PC Gamer counted 131,929 games tagged as AI Generated out of 1,769,316 listed at the time of writing, about 7.5%. That is a floor, not a measurement. It only captures developers honest enough to tick the box.

So the evidence is circumstantial but loud. The Verge noted that the graph does not flag when AI was used, yet said it was hard to think of another reason daily submissions would double in two months. I would put it the same way: AI is the obvious suspect, not a proven cause.

PC Gamer also points to timing. The jump follows the July 24 launch of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, which the outlet says is good at reverse engineering code. It links that to faster decompiling of old games, a flood of AI-made releases on Steam and indie studios cancelling public demos for fear of being cloned. PC Gamer says Anthropic has since updated Claude to limit directly copying games, but that it is hard to tell whether that has slowed anything. That is the outlet's reading, not something itch.io has said. Steam shows a similar shape: PC Gamer notes demos at its latest Next Fest rose from about 4,000 to more than 8,000.

Polygon, in turn, argues that a flood of pages with no matching audience hurts the hand-made games that indies rely on being found. Itch.io is home to game jam projects, student experiments and charity bundles, where discovery depends on browsing and a little luck. Double the supply and the odds drop for everyone not posting at machine speed.

PC Gamer suggests the surge may burn itself out if people uploading vibe-coded games get bored when nobody plays them. Maybe. The risk it names is that players tire first. We have seen a version of this elsewhere: Spotify pulled more than 50 million AI tracks from its recommendations, another store learning that cheap generation breaks curation faster than rules can catch up.

For now itch.io has handed its community a graph, a shrug and a pair of emojis. A plan is what the people replying are waiting for.