itch.io has seen a sharp increase in new games — perhaps it's all thanks to AI
Developers have started releasing games much more frequently on the digital store itch.io. Over the past two months, the average daily number of game pages created on the platform has effectively doubled.
This statistic was shared by the itch.io team on the social network Bluesky. According to the published chart, at the beginning of August, around 3,000 new game pages were added daily on the platform, but by the end of October, this number had grown to 6,000.
Meanwhile, itch.io indicated that the surge did not cause excitement among gamers — neither game sales nor downloads showed comparable growth.
The store team implied that the situation might have been influenced by the popularity of using AI-based technologies in game development. In response to a user's question about the reasons for the increase, they wrote "guess" accompanied by two emojis: a robot and a crying face.
As noted by the portal PC Gamer, the increase in new games on itch.io coincided with the release of the Claude Opus 5 model, which debuted in July. It demonstrated high efficiency in tasks related to reverse engineering of software and games. However, in the more recent version — Claude Opus 5.5 — there is already an officially stated ban on using the neural network to copy other people's games.