Itch.io deletes terabytes of AI slop and adds a No AI filter
The indie storefront wiped mass-produced AI uploads, doubled down on disclosure, and gave buyers a filter that Steam has never offered.
What itch.io did
On November 3, the storefront posted on Bluesky: "Just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop." The follow-up line did most of the work: "Just because you can upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models doesn't mean you should upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI generated models."
The deletion was only half of it. The same day, itch.io expanded its generative AI disclosure requirement. Game assets have required an AI disclosure for about two years. Tabletop games, books, comics, and soundtracks now need one too, and pages without a completed disclosure can no longer be created or edited in those categories.
The storefront also added browse and search filters that exclude games using generative AI, in whole or in part. There is a No AI tag page that does exactly what it says.
Why now
itch.io never published a formal postmortem, but the numbers it shared on Bluesky tell the story. Game pages created per day doubled over the past two months. When a Bluesky user asked why, the official account replied "take a guess" with a crying emoji and a robot emoji, and noted that downloads and purchases had not doubled.
That gap is the tell. Pages went up at twice the rate, and nobody was buying what was on them.
itch.io's quality guidelines now spell out what gets treated as spam: projects predominantly created by algorithms with minimal human intervention, randomly generated content with no curated design, and multiple iterations of essentially the same thing. Pages that match get pulled from browse and search.
The contrast with Steam
The timing matters. A few days before the itch.io purge, Valve acknowledged that Steam has a problem with AI slop and cloned games, and said it does not want to be the gatekeeper that tells developers which tools to use.
So two storefronts looked at the same flood and picked different responses. Valve is keeping disclosure as the main mechanism and leaving curation alone. itch.io, a much smaller storefront, is actively deleting uploads and handing its users filters to cut AI content out of search entirely.
Neither approach scales cleanly. Steam is too large to review uploads by hand, and its disclosure database has already been shown to miss or mislabel AI use. itch.io's purge works partly because the site is small enough to act this way, and the deleted terabytes will regrow as long as mass-uploading stays profitable. The filters help buyers find human work; they do not stop the uploads from arriving.
What buyers get today
If you shop on itch.io, the practical changes are already live. Search results can exclude games that use generative AI in assets, and now in tabletop, books, comics, and soundtracks too. The disclosure fields are mandatory for those categories, so the filter has more data to work with than it did last week.
Steam has required AI disclosure since January 2024, and there is still no way to filter disclosures out of your store view. Valve's position is that hiding games is a form of judgment it would rather not make. Whether enough players care to change that calculus is the thing to watch, and itch.io just handed everyone a live experiment to measure it against.
