itch.io deletes terabytes of AI uploads as half of new Steam games disclose AI

Tuesday's AI gaming news is mostly about the stores. When making a game, or something that looks like one, gets cheap and fast, the first place you notice it is the shop window: more pages, more uploads, and more work for the people who decide what goes on sale.

This week, that showed up in three ways. itch.io, the open indie storefront, said the number of new game pages it gets each day has doubled in two months, then deleted what it called "a couple terabytes of AI slop" and widened its AI disclosure rules and filters. On Steam, an analysis of public store data found that almost half of the games released in October disclosed AI-generated content. And one small publisher says a launch with more than 11,000 wishlists peaked at 15 players after a long wait in Steam's review queue, which it blames on AI spam. Finally, a slightly more technical one: Sony has filed a patent application for a way to stream games that cuts holes in each frame and lets an AI model fill them back in.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

itch.io deletes "a couple terabytes" of AI uploads

If you haven't used it, itch.io is an online store where independent creators sell games, game art, music, books and more. It is famously open: almost anyone can set up a page and start selling, which is a big part of why small developers like it.

On Sunday, November 1, itch.io posted on Bluesky that the number of game pages being created each day had doubled in the past two months. In a reply, it added that the number of downloads and purchases had not doubled. When someone asked why pages were up, the store's account answered "take a guess," with a robot emoji.

Game Developer wrote it up the next day. By its reading of the chart in itch.io's post, the store went from roughly 3,000 new pages a day around August to nearly 8,000 in October. Game Developer also noted that itch.io implied, rather than stated outright, that generative AI was behind the rise.

On Monday, itch.io added some detail in replies on Bluesky. It said that bulk uploaders, who create pages in large numbers, break its content quality guidelines and get removed from its listings. But it also said its own analysis showed the increase was driven by first-time uploaders, not bulk uploaders. In other words, by itch.io's account this is not a handful of spam operations, but a lot of new people putting things up.

Then, early on Tuesday, came the cleanup. "Just deleted a couple terabytes of ai slop," itch.io wrote. A few minutes later, it added that just because you can upload 10 terabytes of poorly optimized AI-generated models, it doesn't mean you should, and pointed out that its quality guidelines have had a clause against AI spam for more than two years. In what it called its official statement, it said it is very generous with what it offers without limitation, but that people are now abusing it to the max, "and it makes us sad."

A quick note on the term. "AI slop" is the internet's name for low-effort content churned out with AI tools, often in bulk, in the hope that some of it gets noticed or sold. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, so "a couple terabytes" is a lot of files, though itch.io didn't say how many pages or projects that covered. FRVR and other outlets picked the posts up on Tuesday.

More disclosures, and an AI filter in search

The deletion came with two rule changes.

The first is about disclosure. For about two years, people selling game assets on itch.io, things like character art, sound effects or 3D models, have had to say whether they used generative AI. On Tuesday, itch.io said the tabletop, books, comics and soundtracks categories now require an AI disclosure too, before a page can be created or edited.

The second is about filtering. itch.io said it is adding generative AI disclosure filtering to more places on the site where it had been critically lacking, including its search results page. The idea is simple: players who would rather not see AI-made work get an easier way to hide it.

There is a catch, and it's the same one every store has. The disclosure is filled in by the creators themselves, so a filter is only as good as their honesty. Game Developer also noted that the AI disclosure question doesn't have to be answered before a page is created.

To get a sense of scale, Game Developer tried the "No AI" filter on itch.io's newest games. The list shrank from 1,772,099 results to 432,180. That isn't a clean count of AI games, since the labels are self-reported and haven't always been required. But it does show how much of the store a filter like this can take out of view.

Almost half of October's new Steam games disclosed AI

Steam, the biggest PC game store, has its own version of this story. On Monday, Dexerto reported on an analysis of Steam's public data by a Reddit user who goes by ploz, covering about 63,600 games.

Some background first. In January 2024, Valve, the company that runs Steam, made AI disclosures mandatory: developers have to say when a game uses AI-generated content. In January 2026 it changed the rules to focus on AI content that players actually see or hear, rather than tools used behind the scenes during development.

Here's what the analysis found:

• In January 2024, 1.7% of new releases carried an AI disclosure.
• In October 2025, it was 26.4%.
• In October 2026, it was 49.9%, almost exactly half.
• Across whole years, the share was 13.2% in 2024, 24% in 2025 and 40.1% so far in 2026.

The bigger the game, the less likely it was to disclose AI. Among 2026 games with fewer than 10 reviews, 47% did. Among games with at least 1,000 reviews, it was 14%. Developers who released 10 or more games this year disclosed AI in 68% of them, compared with 37% for developers with a single release. That fits the picture itch.io described: a lot of the growth is in the long tail of small releases, not in the games most players have heard of.

As for what the AI is used for, artwork came first, in 63% of games with a disclosure. Then text and translations (30%), store pages and marketing material (26%), music (21%) and code (16%). AI-generated voices showed up in 7%, and content generated live inside the game in 3%.

Two caveats. These are one person's analysis of public data, reported by Dexerto, not Valve's own figures. And because the labels are self-reported, Dexerto notes the real numbers are likely higher.

One small launch, 11,000 wishlists and 15 players

Numbers like these are abstract. A second Dexerto story, published Tuesday, shows what the crowding can feel like from one small team's side.

Wheel Make It is a physics-based co-op game from the developer tlproductions, published by 2 Left Thumbs. Two players each control one wheel of the same wheelchair. It was due out on October 12. According to the developers' own Steam announcement that day, the game had been waiting about two weeks for Steam's approval, and Dexerto reports that reviewers had trouble getting into its local co-op mode. As the publisher put it: "you literally just share a keyboard."

The game launched on November 1. Dexerto says it peaked at 15 players at the same time in its first 24 hours, despite more than 11,000 wishlists. A wishlist is when a player saves a game on Steam to be told when it comes out; it's one of the main signals small studios watch before launch, because it usually turns into early sales and visibility.

In a post on X on November 2, 2 Left Thumbs pointed to what it called a "tidal wave of AI-slop" in Steam's review queue as the reason for the delay. Dexerto is careful about this. It notes that the disclosure figures don't prove AI games caused Wheel Make It's delay, and that Valve has not publicly confirmed that AI submissions caused any review backlog. Plenty can go wrong with a small launch, and a missed date can cost momentum on its own. Still, it's a sign of how developers are starting to read their own bad luck through the lens of the AI flood.

Sony's patent: cut holes in the picture, let AI fill them in

The last story is a different kind of AI in games, and a more technical one.

Cloud gaming means the game runs on a powerful computer somewhere else, and you get a live video of it streamed to your screen while your button presses travel the other way. It's a bit like Netflix, except you're playing. The hard part is sending all that video quickly enough that it looks good and doesn't lag.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe has filed a patent application that tries to send less. It was published on October 29 and spotted by the patent site Patentlyze, and MIXED and Android Headlines covered it over the following days.

As they describe it, the system picks parts of each frame to remove before the frame is compressed and sent. In the patent's own words, it would "insert a plurality of holes in the image." On the receiving device, an AI model then rebuilds the missing areas from what's left. To stop the AI from inventing detail that was never there, the sender also leaves small "anchor elements," little samples of the real detail, in some of the gaps, which the reconstruction model uses as a guide. According to MIXED, the filing presents cloud gaming as one use, and mentions VR or mixed reality devices as possible receivers too.

The caveats matter here. This is a patent application, not an announced PlayStation feature. MIXED notes that it reports no measured bandwidth saving and no guaranteed reduction in input lag, and nothing in it confirms the technique will run on PlayStation Portal, Sony's handheld that can stream games through PlayStation Plus Premium, or on any future console. Companies patent many ideas that never ship.

What it does show is a direction. Instead of pushing more raw data down the line, the idea is to send less and let AI on your own device do some of the work.

The big picture

For most of the past two years, the debate about AI in games has been about studios: who uses it, whether they say so, and what it means for the people who make games. This week the pressure shows up somewhere else, at the stores.

itch.io says its pages per day have doubled while sales haven't, and it is now deleting bulk uploads and giving players more ways to filter out AI-made work. On Steam, a self-reported label that was on fewer than 2% of new releases in early 2024 was on almost half of them last month, by one analysis, mostly among small games few people review. And at least one indie publisher believes the crowding cost it a launch, even if that's hard to prove.

The tools stores are reaching for are the same everywhere: disclosure labels, filters, and quality rules against spam. All of them depend on creators telling the truth, and on stores having the people and systems to check. Players, meanwhile, are being asked to do a bit more of the sorting themselves. Whether that's enough, or whether stores end up changing how open they are, is the question to watch.