Because if you disrespect your customers enough, you'll have to deal with a ton of refunds, getting banned from the platform, and never selling another game under your own name again.
You don't have some sort of right to put your game in front of other people. Some of those people don't want AI content, and if you try and sneak it in anyway, you've done a massive disrespect to your customers.
You run the chances of being perhaps more easily targeted by self-righteous assholes, sacrificing for the common good you hope to also benefit from. If you appreciate that being able to separately browse between AI and non-AI works is useful, especially without particular moral judgement, and recognize this capability as socially facilitated, then the way to cultivate that behavior is to take the leap if you can yourself.
As long as people are on the lookout for AI stuff with their eyes in the red, this won't work. If you invert the mechanism and tell people hey my shit is AI, you take the wind out their sails, and directly disprove that you're some monster trying to trick or hurt them. It's easily avoided, so that narrative doesn't work anymore. Less ground for the villification to work on their part, as you can no longer be the cartoon villian they want to think you are.
Not the first platform with this feature by far either.
It's basically an honor system. The point is exactly to show that you're willing to be (somewhat) vulnerable. You can only demonstrate that you're not misusing people's trust, if there is trust to misuse. As long as AI usage is treated as betrayal, this is what remains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_system
It's very distressing that you can't even fathom people would self-disclose. You clearly understand that a lot of people would refrain from purchasing if they knew...
This is a hard problem to solve that always existed but is exacerbated by the barrier to entry dropping to the ground.
Really itch is kinda hitting what the mobile markets have been dealing with since long before LLMs, those markets were awash with clones and low quality even outright scammy crap.
Though maybe a bit harder for Itch since their whole shtick is being a low barrier place for people to put their game. Arguably the platform has always had slop, but I would categorize the majority as "honest slop", a person who maybe isn't any good at making games, or doesn't follow through actually finishing their game putting something up there.
anyone old enough to remember Newgrounds and the era of flash knows that loads of flash games were awful. but you would get a more normal Pareto distribution. Ai has lowered the bar so low that ratio becomes skewed. like 1:99 instead of 80:20 with the flood.
Banning AI seems like a non starter, you can make "honest slop" with ai, you can make even good games with it. Self tagging is basically saying "i don't want anyone to play my game". an honest game with AI will get thrown into the pit with the total crap. it's death.
chewing up real people in filters or auto-mod just makes the problem worse. Real people give up on the platform because they were burned, only the AI slop persists.
I don't know how you retain an open and friendly platform that's accepting of honest slop but can stem the tide of genuine slop.
The issue with AI slop is not so much the slop itself (there was always slop) but the amount of slop. When people are producing slop they are limited by time and ability, so the slop can go from mildly annoying to quite bad, but no more. However when it's entirely machine produced, you're literally drowned in slop if nothing is done. It's like the difference between being crapped on by a pigeon and falling in a manure pool
Why anyone would willingly do this is beyond me. It's like putting a sticker on your own back that says "Kick me"
Because if you disrespect your customers enough, you'll have to deal with a ton of refunds, getting banned from the platform, and never selling another game under your own name again.
You don't have some sort of right to put your game in front of other people. Some of those people don't want AI content, and if you try and sneak it in anyway, you've done a massive disrespect to your customers.
Basically, don't be an asshole. That's why
Because hopefully soon the alternative will be getting banned from itch.
It's called civility.
You run the chances of being perhaps more easily targeted by self-righteous assholes, sacrificing for the common good you hope to also benefit from. If you appreciate that being able to separately browse between AI and non-AI works is useful, especially without particular moral judgement, and recognize this capability as socially facilitated, then the way to cultivate that behavior is to take the leap if you can yourself.
As long as people are on the lookout for AI stuff with their eyes in the red, this won't work. If you invert the mechanism and tell people hey my shit is AI, you take the wind out their sails, and directly disprove that you're some monster trying to trick or hurt them. It's easily avoided, so that narrative doesn't work anymore. Less ground for the villification to work on their part, as you can no longer be the cartoon villian they want to think you are.
Not the first platform with this feature by far either.
It's basically an honor system. The point is exactly to show that you're willing to be (somewhat) vulnerable. You can only demonstrate that you're not misusing people's trust, if there is trust to misuse. As long as AI usage is treated as betrayal, this is what remains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_system
It's very distressing that you can't even fathom people would self-disclose. You clearly understand that a lot of people would refrain from purchasing if they knew...
The comments here are like a Bizarro world version of HN. Replace pro gen ai sentiment with negative
This is what they're dealing with: https://i.imgur.com/w25SmDR.jpeg
This is a hard problem to solve that always existed but is exacerbated by the barrier to entry dropping to the ground.
Really itch is kinda hitting what the mobile markets have been dealing with since long before LLMs, those markets were awash with clones and low quality even outright scammy crap.
Though maybe a bit harder for Itch since their whole shtick is being a low barrier place for people to put their game. Arguably the platform has always had slop, but I would categorize the majority as "honest slop", a person who maybe isn't any good at making games, or doesn't follow through actually finishing their game putting something up there.
anyone old enough to remember Newgrounds and the era of flash knows that loads of flash games were awful. but you would get a more normal Pareto distribution. Ai has lowered the bar so low that ratio becomes skewed. like 1:99 instead of 80:20 with the flood.
Banning AI seems like a non starter, you can make "honest slop" with ai, you can make even good games with it. Self tagging is basically saying "i don't want anyone to play my game". an honest game with AI will get thrown into the pit with the total crap. it's death.
chewing up real people in filters or auto-mod just makes the problem worse. Real people give up on the platform because they were burned, only the AI slop persists.
I don't know how you retain an open and friendly platform that's accepting of honest slop but can stem the tide of genuine slop.
The issue with AI slop is not so much the slop itself (there was always slop) but the amount of slop. When people are producing slop they are limited by time and ability, so the slop can go from mildly annoying to quite bad, but no more. However when it's entirely machine produced, you're literally drowned in slop if nothing is done. It's like the difference between being crapped on by a pigeon and falling in a manure pool