Itch.io's new game pages doubled in two months, but downloads didn't

Big number on the itch.io scoreboard, and it’s not a good one for anyone browsing the store. The indie storefront says the number of new game pages created per day has doubled between August 3 and October 30, climbing from around 3,000 to regularly topping 6,000. ¹

Here’s the catch that matters for players: itch.io also says downloads and purchases have not doubled. ¹ Twice the games, same amount of playing and buying. That means the extra pages are splitting the same audience thinner, which may make games harder to find, though the cause isn’t clear.

The suspected cause is AI-generated games. Itch.io never said so outright. When a Bluesky user asked if it knew why, the account answered “take a guess” with a crying face and a robot emoji. ¹ A second user asked if it was “AI dreck” and got a tired-face emoji back. ¹

The timing lines up with the July 24 launch of Claude Opus 5, which has proved good at reverse engineering code and has had knock-on effects across game development. ¹ Anthropic has since updated Claude to curb its ability to copy games directly, but it’s hard to say whether that has slowed the wider flow of AI-made games. ¹

The scale is already large. Of 1,769,316 pages listed on itch.io at the time of writing, 131,929 carry the AI Generated tag, roughly 7.5% of the total. ¹ And the surge isn’t an itch.io-only story: Steam demos shown at the latest Next Fest rose from around 4,000 to over 8,000, a similar doubling. ¹

What does that mean if you own a PC and just want to find something good to play? Every new page competes for the same slots in search and browsing, and a bigger pile means more digging. As the piece puts it, nobody wants to wade through a huge volume of low-quality games to get to the ones they want to play. ¹

Banning AI games is the obvious call from readers, but it may not fix the chart. AI researcher Mike Cook wrote on Bluesky that a ban would be a good move but “won’t change this graph, unfortunately,” since enforcement needs a team of people or a risky public reporting system, and detection is harder than people think. ¹ Valve has also cast doubt on how well such a ban would work on Steam. ¹

The other path is waiting it out. Part of the surge is people posting vibe-coded games, and itch.io’s own numbers suggest most of these uploads aren’t getting real engagement. ¹ If the uploaders lose interest, the flood could ease. The risk is that players lose interest in the storefront first. ¹

Our read: The doubling of pages with flat downloads is the real headline, because it shows supply running far ahead of demand. For anyone who already uses itch.io, the store hasn’t gotten worse to play on, but it has gotten harder to browse. Both itch.io and Steam are seeing the same surge of uploads, and neither has shown a fix yet. Players are the ones waiting on a better filter.

Footnotes

1. PC Gamer, “It’s not just Steam: New game pages created per day on Itch.io have doubled in the last two months, with AI slop the likely culprit”. Retrieved November 1, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³