Itch.io Deleted Terabytes of AI Slop as Nearly Half of October's Steam Releases Disclosed AI Use

The indie game marketplace itch.io has started enforcing a line it drew two years ago. In a blunt post on Bluesky, the platform said it had "just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop," adding: "Just because you can upload 10TB of terribly optimized AI generated models doesn't mean you should."

The purge follows an admission itch.io made last week when Valve acknowledged Steam's own AI slop and clone problem: the number of new game pages created on itch.io each day has doubled in two months, without any matching rise in downloads or purchases. Asked why, the platform's account replied "you guess," alongside crying and robot emoji.

Itch.io's existing rules, in place for more than two years, do not ban generative AI outright. Projects may use it if they disclose it and if it adds substantive value to the experience. What the rules do define as slop is specific: games or projects generated mostly by algorithms with minimal human involvement, randomly generated content with no curation, and near-identical iterations of the same AI output. Bulk-producing pages with automation systems is treated as spam, and such pages can be removed from browse and search.

The platform has also tightened its tooling. A new NoAI tag lets users filter out projects that used generative AI, and itch.io's browsing stats show how much that matters: applying the filter cuts visible results from roughly 1.77 million to about 430,000. Disclosure requirements that previously covered only game assets now extend to tabletop games, books, comics and soundtracks.

The wider numbers are stark. A community analysis of Steam's disclosure system — compiled from public data by the operator of the PCGameStats tracker, covering about 63,600 games released since January 2024 — found that 49.9 percent of titles released in October 2026 disclosed generative AI use, a record and nearly double the 26.4 percent of October 2025. The share was 13.2 percent across 2024 as a whole, 24 percent in 2025, and 40.1 percent for 2026 through October. When Valve's rule took effect in January 2024, the monthly figure was 1.7 percent.

Art assets dominate the disclosed uses at 63 percent, followed by text and translation at 30 percent, store pages and marketing at 26 percent, music at 21 percent, code at 16 percent and voice at 7 percent. Only 3 percent generate content in real time during play. The figures capture only voluntary disclosure — internal development assistance goes unreported — so real usage is higher, and smaller titles disclose far more often: 47 percent of 2026 releases with fewer than ten reviews, against 14 percent of games with more than a thousand.

Players have noticed the difference. Among Steam games with more than 50 reviews, AI-disclosed titles average a 77 percent positive rating versus 83 percent for the rest, a six-point gap the data cannot fully explain. Not everyone in the industry sees disclosure as a good thing: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has called Steam's AI disclosure requirement "a political act" that "deprives developers of opportunities," and Epic has declared an AI-first development approach for future Fortnite updates and Unreal Engine 6.

The split is becoming a real fault line. One camp treats generative AI as a production tool whose use should be visible to buyers; the other treats disclosure itself as stigma. With roughly one in ten of itch.io's 1.79 million titles now carrying an AI-generated tag and half of Steam's monthly releases self-reporting AI use, the platforms that host the flood are the ones being forced to decide what their shelves are for.