Game store itch.io is getting flooded with AI slop

3 Nov 2026 at 8:02 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

The scrappy indie store itch.io is facing a problem - lots and lots of AI slop getting uploaded to it, but they're attempting to fight back against it.

Unlike Steam there's no payment needed to put anything up on itch.io, and there's basically no curation on what goes live. In the past, this has led to a few issues, like people uploaded games others have made, copyrighted assets and more

The official Bluesky account posted how "The number of game pages being created per-day has doubled in the past 2 months":

In response to a user asking "🫩 is it AI dreck?", the itch account simply replied with "🫩" (yes, in other words). Another follow-up post noted how they've "Just deleted a couple terabytes of ai slop 😌".

One thing they're now doing, is expanding their required AI notices to also include "tabletop (aka physical games), books, comics and soundtracks" on top of video games, and they've also added a search option to remove anything with an AI notice. To give you an example of the scale of the issue, filtering just to Linux games shows "153,734 results" but if you tick the new no-AI option it goes right down to "43,057 results".

There's not a whole lot of ways around this issue apart from locking down the store some more, which they may have to do - as this type of problem is likely to continue getting worse.

🌐 External Sources: itch.io, bsky.app/itch.io (..bs23), bsky.app/bardzaku.bsky.social (..gk2c), bsky.app/itch.io (..5s2x), bsky.app/itch.io (..dc2h) Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: AI, Itch.io, Misc 13 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Factorio 2.1 is out now with the native ARM64 Linux build to run on Steam Frame, Raspberry Pi and moreSteam Next Fest Oct 2026 is live with thousands of demosUnity lean heavily into AI prompting games into existence with Unity SparkPlayStation 5 Linux project upgraded to support PS5 Pro and newer firmware All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.