As Steam struggles with clones, Itch.io wipes out "a couple terabytes of AI slop"

As Steam is overwhelmed by AI-generated games and Epic Games attempts to outdo Valve's platform by vibe-coding the Epic Games Launcher, indie game marketplace Itch.io has secured itself a free PR win by taking stricter action against "AI slop" on its storefront.

"Slop" is the word of choice for Itch.io, which proudly proclaims on Twitter: "Just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop."

Exactly what has been deleted isn't clear, but a follow-up post indicates that whatever it was fell into the spam category, and the platform is almost certainly better off without it. "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," it says. "As a reminder we have had an AI spam clause in our quality guidelines for over two years."

The spam clause in question is there to prevent users from "uploading excessive amounts of automatically generated or AI-generated content," with Itch.io acknowledging in the guideline that "in some cases automatically generated or AI-generated content can be useful or interesting," but it shouldn't be used to "mass produce product pages." It says its definition of spam can include "games or projects that are predominantly created by algorithms or AI with minimal human intervention," randomly generated content with "no or minimal curated design," and "multiple iterations of essentially the same content that are generated by AI or algorithms." Seemingly, then, it's content that's gone against this rule that's now been eradicated.

Itch.io already required users to tag their use of generative AI for games and game assets, but this has now been extended to tabletop games, soundtracks, books, and comics, too. Creators now have to fill out an AI disclosure to create new pages or edit existing ones, and as an added bonus, this disclosure just got even more useful to players and customers.

"In order to better control what you see, we're adding Generative AI disclosure filtering to few more places on the site where it was critically lacking, including our search results page," Itch.io adds, sharing a screenshot of the new "Genre/Tag" you can use in your searches if you're looking for games, assets, and so on with "No AI."

In order to better control what you see, we're adding Generative AI disclosure filtering to few more places on the site where it was critically lacking, including our search results page https://t.co/Z9dXncxdgxNovember 3, 2026

For anyone sick of seeing AI creep into games and flooding the various online storefronts, it's refreshing to see action like this taken against the usage of the tech. It's frankly becoming exhausting to see so many AI-generated clones of games clutter Steam, for example – just look at the viral Needle in a Haystack Simulator and the copies that inspired.

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