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We can't seem to get a large hobby site that isn't monetized in some way.  It'd be one thing if folks had the time, resources, and space to just put stuff out in the world but not everyone can afford to.  Because of the constraints of the current economic system, folks who don't have some sort of fallback are forced to compete over very little just to get by.  There's nothing stopping some large, already wealthy company from creating or even funding content spammers, whether they use AI or not, to flood the space to eliminate competition from indies.  They could weather the onslaught but small time game creators would have to fold, unable to pay their bills because their products are mostly getting buried under an avalanche of slush.


 I have no problem putting out the casual, lower quality games that I do because I THOUGHT it was no big deal, that this was basically a hobbyist site.  Honestly wondering if I should leave though, if I'm not contributing to the slush flow.

You lost me there. Itch aint youtube with the content farms that mass produce shovelware clickbait.

Content here is not monetized by existing and generating traffic. The games do not make money by being on Itch, so there is no leverage to spam low effort things.

People vote here with their purse. If they like something, they buy it or "donate" to the project. So if they give money to a project involving ai, that is what they want. For whatever reason. Possibly because it is a good game and the ai is either seen as an enabling factor or actually looks good enough, because effort was put into it. Yeah sure, some naive people put out cookie cutter template games with ai slop and hope for some pocket money. But do they get it? Does such slop appear in here? https://itch.io/games/top-sellers

I do not know the threshold to appear in that list, but over 90% of the games here do not make it. And I have an inkling that anything "slop" is usually not in that list. No matter why it is slop.