AI slop swamps itch.io as storefront moderation strains

Aftermath's Luke Plunkett reports that itch.io's daily count of new game pages has doubled in the past two months, which he attributes almost entirely to AI-generated copycats and vibe-coded 'games'. The platform's voluntary AI tag, introduced in 2024, is widely ignored: Plunkett found plenty of obviously AI-made titles in the latest-releases feed that carried no tag.

Itch itself says downloads and purchases have not doubled, so he argues the harm is to discovery rather than to developers' revenue. Real games get harder to find and the storefront looks like a clearance rack. He doubts that the stronger human moderation that might work for Valve is realistic for a small, community-run site, and he leaves the problem unresolved.

CounterpointDevelopers and advocates who treat generative AI as a legitimate creative tool would say the real problem is spam and discovery, not AI as such, and that better sorting and ranking would help more than tagging or policing.

Previously: GamesIndustry.biz's Rob Fahey called the flood of AI games a 'Slop Grenade' problem for storefronts. — Saturday October 31 edition.

In a Polygon interview, Tali Faulkner of Origanme Digital (Umurangi Generation) describes Penguin Colony as a retelling of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness from the penguins' point of view, with anticolonial and antifascist themes. He says he wanted the message in the game to be hard to ignore, and that he sees the games industry as having failed to respond to the violence in Palestine. Polygon connects the game to the Xbox boycott.

On the practical side, Faulkner credits Australian government funding, noting the game cap is about $100,000 against a $10 million film minimum. He also credits publisher Fellow Traveler for taking the pitch without demanding changes, and says development took roughly a year.

CounterpointPlatform holders and publishers that avoid public political positions would say their stores and catalogs should stay out of geopolitical disputes, and some players share that view.

Previously: Celeste and TowerFall were pulled from the Xbox store in support of the boycott. — Friday October 30 edition.

Simon Carless's GameDiscoverCo newsletter argues that public AI disclosures on Steam can't just be summed to measure AI use in Next Fest demos. The piece points to a less obvious signal in the event data that complicates any headline count. The issue also carries the usual Steam discovery news and weekly charts.

The takeaway is that tallies of disclosed AI use are a shaky proxy for how much generative AI is actually in games.

CounterpointCritics of generative AI who want clearer labelling would say that messy disclosure data is an argument for stricter, standardised rules, not for dismissing the counts.

Previously: Roblox said 80% of its top 100 games used AI tools. — Sunday November 1 edition.

This Week In Videogames' Maddie Agne set out to overcome her fear of horror games by playing Frictional's 2010 Amnesia: The Dark Descent on PlayStation 4. She admits she didn't finish it, managing only brief sessions after long stretches of dread.

She also spoke to Marc Andersen of Aarhus University's Recreational Fear Lab, who describes the 'paradox of horror', the question of why people enjoy an unpleasant emotion. He says the lab's studies point to a 'sweet spot of fear' where fear becomes pleasurable, and Agne's attempt shows how easily it is missed.

CounterpointHorror fans might say that having an escape hatch such as Story Mode or watching others play, as Agne does, is itself a legitimate way to enjoy the genre and needs no 'curing'.

Polygon's Oli Welsh argues that S-Game's Phantom Blade Zero, with Metacritic and OpenCritic scores of 88 and 89 and strong Steam numbers, is the likelier Game of the Year nominee of the two. He calls it and Crimson Desert (Metacritic 77) 'outsider AAA', ambitious non-big-publisher games that appeal to similar Game Awards jurors, and argues Black Myth: Wukong's nomination shows such games travel well.

He says Phantom Blade Zero's better reviews and tighter focus effectively cancel out Crimson Desert, though both could make it, and he would welcome the recognition for new international development scenes.

CounterpointCrimson Desert's supporters, whose backing Welsh acknowledges, would say its update schedule has kept it relevant. Fans of both games may also vote for both at the nomination stage, so the two are not strictly rivals.

PC Gamer's Harvey Randall, 50-plus hours into the World of Warcraft: Forever beta ahead of its November 4 launch, says he is relieved by principal designer Kris Zierhut's plan for major updates roughly every four months, instead of the eight to ten weeks of Season of Discovery. He says retail WoW's seasonal churn has left him exhausted and afraid of missing content.

He is wary of the staggered content planned between patches, but hopes it will be optional and not pressure players to keep up.

CounterpointPlayers who enjoy Season of Discovery's rapid cadence, and those who want constant fresh content, may find a four-month rhythm too slow.