itch.io

There are a ton of patreons with nsfw content. But if this has been so for several months, than maybe some people seeing your games reported you for being an impostor, because they could not verify the patreon you link to from your profile.

Communication with devs could be better, but I also kinda understand why they tend not to tell people what is going on. Worst case they make it even more easy for scammers to upload their things. And best case, the dev does not even know about any investigation. And here it does not matter why there is any manual review. Be it to check eglibility for indexing or quarantine or whatever.

Two months is long but not unheard of and you also uploaded more games in that time, so maybe that put you at the back of the queue.

429 happens occasionally without ddos. If you wait 10 seconds and reload and it does not go away, wait a bit longer before retry.

Itch sometimes delists projects, even developers. For example if they violate quality guidelines. If you call this a shadowban, yes, there are shadowbans. But in context I heard it, it was about things like ignoring devlogs or like arbitrary lowering ranking in popular sort.

But if your account were delisted, you could not have published your game at all on the index. 

If it were visible a short amount of time, this would fit with people reporting your game. Or a coincidence in timing with other reports or automatic triggers putting your things in quarantine. Btw, you did notice that your patreon is unreachable?

Your game is 88 days old. You have four devlogs. Estimated number of "approved" devlogs: 0-1.

After some digging, the number seems to be 0. Now, is there anything unusual about this number? Nope.

I checked on the game behind you in a tag combination. It has the same ranking in recent as you. And an aproved major devlog will put you on top of recent again. It has 4 devlogs since then. And about 10 devlogs before.

Go check yourself, how many of the recent games are new games and how many are there because of a devlog. There are more devlogs than games, yet the majority of games there is new. Conclusion: an approved major devlog is a rarity.

Also, you have 80 followers on Itch. That is a lot for a new dev, especially for your subgenre. And after looking at your patreon, what are you even complaining about?! Seriously. You are very successful. Did you ever have a look at numbers of other developers? Do it. Please do it. 

Well said. Especially software developers adopted the tech. And if you use Photoshop to create digital art, they do not only have procedural filters and effects, they also have generative llm stuff at work. I do not know how those models were created, but a thing like generative fill to enlarge the background around an object or when cutting out an object, is just too good a tool to ignore.

I wonder how "paper & canvas" artists think about digital artists. You can do things with gradient color schemes and a buncha digital effects that are very hard to do with actual paint on a physical object. Same for sketching and overlays and filling out shapes with color. Or a thing like undo.

Sure, using gen ai lowers the entry skill bar a lot. But if you lack the skills to edit the ai output, you have a bit of a problem.

I guess it is the worst with assets. Maybe that is the reason why there are so many ai assets. Creating a consistent character is hard with ai. Creating a standalone background or an icon is quite easy in comparison.

Currently, most AI games did not impress me much. The usage of AI (art) would rather degrade the game, than enhance it. But those games probably would not have been made at all, without AI. So, whatever, as there are a lot of non AI games that did not impress me too.

As for declarations, I would welcome a declaration about human art and other things as well: was it done by underpaid, overworked, exploited artists or even children in a sweat shop? Made with AI is a bit short sighted, as there are a lot of different AI. Was there not this anectode about the British wanting to have those cheap stuff that was made in Germany in the 19th century be declared as well to avoid it? Funny how that turned out.

Here, you have a company building a software using source material it has not paid for and selling it to you.

So your argument would fall flat against all models that use licensed source material. And against ai material that was not purchased. You know you can download a model and create stuff on your home pc? I tried it once. That consumes less power than me playing a game.

In order to build the software in question, companies needs a country level of energy (and water)

Uhm. Nope. What really needs country level of energy is crypto currency. Datacenters just meet the demand of all the internet and stuff. Around 2% of global energy was used on that even before AI. Hating on datacenter energy consumption also means, you should not use google maps to navigate. Or browse on Itch, for that matter. Or watching Netflix and Co.

I really wonder why people now use all these arguments against the evil ai, but I never noticed the same outcry against crypto. And crypto is many times worse in that regard.

Anyway, depending on the use case, a search query to an ai system might even be more efficient than using the same quere several times on a normal internet search till you find what you are looking for. And if it would be more costly but no one would pay for it, it will dwindle down.

But we are actually speaking about ai in games, are we not. Do you think the devs struggling with budget use a lot of money on AI art? If they had that kind of money, they could easily pay real artists. You can download an ai system and use it on your own pc. Not all those systems are from the evil big tech companies. Some are open source.

Making games using those tools devalue the craft of making games

So my question to you too:

How are your thoughts about using a game engine?

Juding from your post, you might consider using a game engine as devaluing the craft. There be amateurs churning out a "game" by clicking some stuff together and call themselves developers, after all. 

My argument was, that is was not obvious.

And your clean room design has also issues that are not obvious. You might not break "copyright" under certain circumstances, but you will break trademarks and other legal barriers, like patents. Also, this is just to circumvent having used a "copy". Which too would be circumvented by using a llm.

So how would a clean room aproach look like for an image or a work of art? Oh, and no, you do not break copyright by writing down a poem you remembered. You break copyright by publishing it, because you distribute a "copy" and you did not have the "right to copy". But this interpretation is different world wide.

Using a work to create another work without permission is not a copyright breach, unless you use exact portions of that work. It might be a licensing issue or other legal stuff. But not copyright. That clean room approach was for example used to recreate functionality of software code, because, of course, afterwards there were accusations that portions of the code were used.

So in other words: as I said, you can't copyright the knowledge how something looks. Or what it does in case of software. You might give a patent if you have a broken patent law.

Aso a llm basically uses the hash value of a work. Some earlier version might have had portions of original works inside the database, but when you read about the complaints against those systems it was about the content of those databases and decidedly not the output of the llm.

I stand by my opinion. It is not obvious how to handle llm generative ai systems. Neither legally, nor in society, nor in art. Or games. The emerging consens among players seems to be, to prefer human made art. The emerging consens among software developers seems to be, yeah, another tool to play with that can churn out templates in a hurry and find semantical errors in a programming language.

the main issues right now, at least in my opinion, are leeching off other people's work

How are your thoughts about using a game engine?

The leeching is only seen negative because some artists do not want to have their art be teaching material. Yet in sofware and especially game development, basing your work on other people's work is a fundamental principle. Actually it would not be possible for most developers to create something like a game, without relying on previous works, libaries and full blown game engines. Often even the game principle itself is copied.

Oh, I did mean that literal. It just is not obvious how to handle llm systems and their capabilities. It is a new concept. Anyone claiming it is obivous just has their own opinion and tries to convince other people with non arguments. It is a type of fallacy. Propably this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

But we need real arguments and reasoning to deal with llm in the future. The tech won't go away. And arguments of an ethical nature can be overcome and what then? Arguments that machines take human jobs? Those never worked.

Without hand-created art to train on, there would be no AI art.

One particular method would not exist. There was AI art before, as AI is a very poor choice of words, as it would include all sorts of machine generated things.

If you would imagine a world where training a model by human made art would be illegal, there are still other ways to make a machine create images. So, there would be "AI art", just not the thing we currently understand by that word.

they are obviously infringing

It is not obvious. If it were, it would be forbidden from day one, everywhere.

When an art student looks at art works and gets inspiration, even imitates techniques and then creates a new work, how can that artist claim copyright. The basis of that work was obviously infringed from other works, just remixed and with some added random bits to create something new.

The only difference is, that the remixing was done inside a human mind.

Maybe read this one here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work to understand that it is anything but obvious. Also, copyright ist the right to copy. An AI work that used training data is not a copy.

You can't copyright the knowledge how things look. If you teach a black box how things look and it has the ability to understand a prompt and use that knowledge to create something, that poses a lot of interesting questions with a lot of non obvious and probably conflicting answers.

If you are not comfortable with a 13yo playing your game, use the sensitive meta info.

Itch has no age rating system. It is adult yes or no. And minimum age for users according to tos is 13yo.

But do not underestimate the topics teenagers are comfortable with. Using a content disclaimer on page either way is a good idea.

Just don't use any of the adult tags, like "adult", or people will expect graphical adult content.

Pages in quarantine are still accessible. There must have been some other issue, or something was lost in translation.

I do not even know, if an account can get quarantined.

Or what did you mean with being flagged as spam? Which thingy told you this?

The game on your profile is currently indexed. Flagged games are not indexed, but accessible. So maybe the issue was resolved since.

Oh, and there is a chance that your new game will not be indexed, when you release it. But this does not hinder your game's promotion. People would go there by direct link and not by searching your game's name.

I would like to be explicitly make the game available for free by having the This file is a demo and can be downloaded for free option available for this type of game.

You explicitly do make the game available for free by setting a minimum price of 0. Adding a this file is a demo adds confusion, not clarity.

What you propose would solve the issue of designating the demo version on a free game - which is usually solved by simply naming the file demo version.

What would solve your issue is to have the donate button and the dowload button separated. You will see such a donate button on web games that have no downloadable files. And you will see the download button on projects that accept no payment. Itch's solution to this scenario is the pay what you want button.

The tag is not a tag and it is a tag. Confused? You should be.

The feature is not working - yet. I do not know how it is planned.

The games you see with ai tags in the info box do have manually chosen tags.

The games you see without ai tags in the box, but still appear when browsing for certain ai tags have it applied silently by the meta info.

https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging

You published one day ago. With first time payment. Those take longer. 

What you write is inconsistent.

A demo is never paid. And a demo is not the full game. That is what makes it a demo. You can't make a game available for free by calling it a demonstration of the full game - it is the full game.

Also, you cannot pay 0. Not paying isn't technically the same as paying 0. Because any payment will put the game into your library as a purchased item. "Paying 0" does not do this. Sure, colloquially it is the same. But if the game will get a minimum price later on, you cannot download it again, because you did not buy it, because you did not pay anything. 

So maybe it helps with your barrier if you see the consequences of not paying. No payment = no purchase & no ownership in library.

Maybe it also helps with your psychological barrier for your own games, if you put two files on the project and make one file be an individually priced item.

So you would have 

game.zip

and if you pay x or more you have access to

thankyou-wallpaper.jpg

x should be 2 bucks or more. 1 buck as a price is not really worth the effort with the payment processors.

And what kinda ticks me off are the actual demo versions that pose as a free game. Come on people. Either publish on Itch or don't. And if you do, you can have a demo version on your paid game. But putting out a "free game" with a pay what you want button is just not cool, if it is a demo. People that pay here, expect early access and access to the game, when it is done. Yeah, sure, you could collect supporter donations, but why not collect them by having your early access game paid with a free demo.

they are not comparable, one is vastly simpler than the other.

Yes. A skilled artist can create a satisfying line art within a minute with only paper and a pen. It is like writing in pictures, once you have that skill. I would call that simple.

You do can compare those things, but the scale of simplicity does not apply.

An analogy would be to compare taking a photo of a scene vs painting it with oil or water colors on canvas. The required skill is different. And now people have cameras available all the time, which need very little skill with the technology to get a photo at all.

So, to get a result with a prompt, that is easy. Just hit enter after writing. To get the result you wanted with a prompt, is vastly more complicated and often involves hand editing the result and sifting through hundreds of outputs - not unlike taking photos.

And I want to enter a third option into the ring. Procedural rendering. That's pretty advanced these days, but not really complicated, once the engine is there. You just adjust some sliders or hit random and there's your reuseable character. Even ready to use in real time. Simple, ain't it.

The issue I have with AI images is, that they look boring. It is all the same and most of it is thus immediatly recogniseable. Ironically it takes skill to use AI images effectively. Just not the skill to draw by hand.

Why do most people think that using AI is just a simple thing

Because people want simple answers to comlex things. AI bad is a simple answer. And devalueing the work spent on an ai image is quickly done by claiming it is simple. I tried once for fun. I failed, or rather I saw my limitations. If I were to make a game I probably would use a 3d or 2d engine or use renders - and still no artists would get commissions...

Sure, if you know what you are doing, creating images is a hell a lot faster than digitally creating them with templates in your sophisticated image creation software and is hell a lot faster than painting it on paper or canvas.

And even if you know nothing of the other ways, using an ai tool will give some output. And good luck with consistency, if you have a character. 

Those people probably also think that taking a photo is a simple thing. After all, there is no such thing as professional photographers, now that everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets all the time. ;-)

It is just a different skill set. I guess a skilled photographer and editor would qualify for many things a good ai operator would need to know: spot and select the good ones.

about using AI: Does it devalue the game development process or the inverse ?

It devalues some games. But it heavily depends. Some games get value from AI. Some even get existence, because they would not have been possible without it. But that the most popular games rarely feature games with ai is not a coincicence or because of ai hate. I think it also correlates with general budget and professionalism. So, hobby games tend to have more ai and professional games less. On the artwork side at least.

As for the development process itself... how do you compare the value in that? If it gets you quick results and keeps you going, that is value. If it bores you or you are frustrated because you can't get a consistent main character with ai, that's bad and no value. You might learn new skills, which sounds like value. But you might focus on skills that do not advance your game development, which sounds like less value.

With game development in particular, there is the thing with game engines. Does it give value to the game development process, if you use an engine, instead of using basic os library calls? 

My point is, there is just no reason to ban it. I did not get the impression, that there are arbitrary rules here at work on Itch. They might not list some things in their index, but that is not the same as banning.

And requiring a disclosure on ai gen created assets does have external reasons. It is not arbitrary. Assets are used in other projects. 

You misunderstood a lot of things, it seems to me.

Your games are indexed. Your games show up when searching them on the net.

And that one example game even shows up in external catalogues, where you mistakenly think it was appropriated.

that is from a Russian hacker (do not click because it is very dangerous). He appropriated 'Ultimate version "Bacci and the ducklings" (32 Bit) v.2.1:'. I am sure of it.

Why? Because you are wrong, that is why I am asking. All three of your links are game catalogues. Including the russian one. Your game exists, and therefore it will be listed in game catalogues that list published games. And those catalogue listings will appear in an internet search. 

https://itch.io/search?q=Paolo+Fassin

I count 21 items. Some are marked as adult games, those will not show up when searching in a new private browser window. Or when adult content is not activated in someone's account.

Your game shows up just fine, in search and with tags. Even with all the clutter in the title, like (  " . Even the : ist part of the title.

https://itch.io/search?type=games&q=Bacci

https://itch.io/search?type=games&q=%E2%80%8BUltimate+version+%22Bacci+and+the+d...

https://itch.io/games/tag-fps/tag-high-score/tag-music/tag-pixel-art

And what is this nonsense about stolen game?

Did you google your game's name and saw those sites having information about your game and thought they "stole" your game? Seriously?

Also, please use the format options when writing a post.

Like when you quote someone, use the quote format option.

A game can only be released once at a place. There is no agreed upon defintion what constitutes a release or the release status - not on Itch, which is a self publishing platform. Some understand it to be the date of first upload. Some the date when it is done. Some when the game reaches version 1.0. But people do not even agree upon how to number their versions.

On a professionals only platform (any game console and Steam) there is a fixed release date. The date after which the game does no longer count as beta/in development/early access or whatever and is available to the general public. If it were a physical item, it would be the date after which the stores are allowed to sell it.

If you have major updates, make a major update devlog. https://itch.io/devlogs/major-update

Not many people read those announcement threads. Go a few pages back and you will see that most posts have like 20-40 views. And those views do not translate to views on the project. Those are only views of the thread.

It is only enforced for assets. Unless you lie about the gen ai nature of things and claim you made it yourself, I do not think this will be a problem.

For games, the question is, how or if players will use or not use the new infos. There are catalogues of items where you would have check boxes to select which attributes the items you will see can have. Itch only has one such check box that I know of, and that is the adult content checkbox.

The rest is just tags. And those stack up to an url. However that works under the hood. In comparison, on Steam you have several account settings and when browsing games you do have check boxes. But they also have a limited pool of tags and so on. So you could check boxes for pvp, languages, some tags, the os, controller support and so on. Adding a filter to that layout to filter the 4 gen ai categories would be trivial in concept.

But on Itch with the tags, the only tag currently is no-ai and that is a catch it all. (Yeah, there are 5 positive tags, but I somehow suspect, the negative tag(s) will be used much more often).

Oh, and objectivly telling if something is gen ai or not is simple. Did you make it with a prompt of a llm gen ai system and optionally modified it afterwards? If yes, then it is "ai".

That is why all the coders are very concerned, because asking a gen ai system to spit out some code snippet and integrating it in your code is business as usual, but would qualify the whole game as "ai" under that no-ai tag.

If your oil painter worked a year to "create" the painting and then claims he created it himself, does this also mean, he made the colors himself and that he has woven the canvas himself? That none of his pupils helped color in the boring background?

The canvas is a bit overdone, but painters in the olden times did often mix their paints themselves. Some probably even made their own brushes.

In game creation there are engines used most of the time. How can a game developer even claim to have made a game, when 99% of the code is in the engine? And yes, there are devs that try to hand craft their own game engine. While there is no such reverse tag, you can imagine one: no-engine. There are engine meta tags.

People against slave labour gen ai might be surprised what can be considered such. I would not surprised if all or most game engines have some code in it that was created with the help of ai. And with the vegan mindset to avoid all things with even traces of animal ai, now that would be interesting.

I agree with the percentage being not applicable. See my example with the engine code. But I also think that use of ai code should not be put together with use of ai content, when classifying "ai". Creation of code is so much different from creating art. In other words: if you successfully can write a prompt for an ai to make the code do what you want, than this form of ai gen is not really different from translation natural language into machine language.

For assets this is all good and well. But for games there is the issue of the "no-ai" (meta) tag.

How will people use it. For what purpose?

To filter out games that used ai gen assets? 

To filter out games that used state of the art code generation tools?

Are there any players here that plan to use the no-ai tag while browsing for games? What are your expectations?

Do you care for ai gen code? Do you even consider it generative ai usage, or is it only "content" that you want to avoid, such as ai gen stories, dialogue, images and in general everything the developer might have commissioned an "artist" for?

In my opinion and observation of discussions about ai, code is not a focus. People either do not care or do not think of code when arguing against or in favor of ai gen things. For code, a thing like ai gen can be considered as a next level in programming abstraction. People do not code in assembler most of the time. They do not even use a language that is close to the hardware, like C. They use "higher" languages. In case of games, the use of librariers and game engines are also a step higher. All this, including ai gen, simplifies code to the point where the pseudo code is the code.

When you use a prompt to generate an image, you want an image and try hundreds of times, till you get an image you like. When you use a prompt to generate code, you cannot just randomly check all of the results till you like one for esthetics. It has to do what you want it to do. Also, most ai code generation seems to be luxurious autocompletion and templates.

Actually, it was a "requirement" for games even before. It was and is in the quality guidelines.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...

If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.

Though one can misread it to mean live generated AI stuff. There are games that do that. But in context it talks about AI content, such as images.

But in many cases, it was not necessary to bother either way.  The usage of AI in games is often very blatantly obvious. Problematic are only the cases where the developer is activly lying or hiding the AI usage. And as has been discussed above, the usage of some AI generated code is not the same as AI generated images and story, so most people do not even think about this, when talking about "AI", in my opinion, because code != content.

While some developers did use the tagging system to state their usage of AI, there was no commonly agreed upon tag for that or the reverse.

The new feature adds the capabilities to give the information in the meta section and generate a standard tag and anti-tag and even sub-tags and hopefully more anti-subtags. And as soon, as the AI info is given in the actual information box on the project page, devs need no longer worry about that "clearly stated in your project description". (The meta info "tag" is currently is not shown. If you see an ai tag, it was manually added by the dev, not by the system. You do can search by that tag, but you do not see the ai meta info on the project page, like you do see engine info or session length and such)

With the current filtering options, a no-ai tag is also very handy, although only to be trusted for assets after the grace period, because the AI info is strictly enforced for assets due to legal ambiguties. Assets are meant to be used in other projects after all.

I do hope there will be a no-ai-content tag to exclude the code usage, because I suspect there are many developers that use ai tools for their code and most people that want to browse for "no-ai" would not mind ai code, but only ai story, images and voices. 

I belive this summary above from a user might desribe it very well, till a better definition comes along.

The tag looks like it's required for "project contains content produced by generative AI tools," not "generative AI tools were used in the production of this project."

So if you trace ai references, the content is not ai made. Even though other artists might give you the same stinky eye they would give you for tracing their art.

If you created the content with a prompt and hand edit it afterwards, it fits the definition in the initial post and that metainfo box.

If you wrote a story and spell and grammer check it with ai, you still wrote it. If you prompt a llm to give you a story and you fix some plotholes, it also fits the definition of gen ai in the initial post.

And the stance I read between and in the lines is: it's just a tag and only important for assets. And if you have to ask if your prompt made asset is gen ai, then it is.

As for percentages, imagine you take an image from an IP. Like a famous cartoon rodent. Then you modify the picture. How much do you have to modify it, for the new image to no longer be a legal problem if you would publish it as your own creation? If there is a clear answer to that, I assume it could apply to gen aI as well.

There is a thing on Steam, if a developer has a development version of a game and is not yet released on Steam, it helps, if people "wishlist" it there. That is why the developers advertise that Steamlink.

Also, there is shop integration. You can buy a game here on Itch and if everything is configured and the developer wishes to do so, the buyer will get a Steam key. This makes less sense for GoG, as games on GoG have no DRM, as most likely the Itch version also has not. Also, I presume the revenue share on GoG is worse than on Itch. While on Steam it might be similar, but you can't beat the reach Steam offers. I have seen games that are on Steam and on Itch and the Steam version has over 5k reviews, while the Itch version has 5.

The Steam platform does offer benefits when playing games with other people. There is no such thing as a friend list on Itch or capabilities to play a game together. Itch is a download store, not a platform to play games together with your friends.

You can publish anything here that is downloadable. Even "physical" games - they publish a printable file.

You do not have shop integration for mobile. So you have to sideload on your device.

You can also publish web games here. Obviously. Look at the browse section of Itch on the left side where it says Platform:

Play in browser

Windows

macOS

Linux

Android

iOS

Even if you are "only" an average programmer, you still are a programmer. You should chose a game engine based on the specs of the game you want to create not on the apparant easyness of the used language of that engine.

After glancing at your game descriptions, the obvious tipp to promote your games on Itch specifically is to have a project that has content that is not behind a 20 bucks paywall.

The problem is, that Itch has no try before you buy. Refunds are possible in some situations, but are for the extreme situations and not for buyers remorse. Steam has a two hours refund no questions asked system, so there is less risk to buy from a dev that you do not know.

A "public version" as I know the term is a free version, not a demo version and also not a paid version. It might have a pay what you want button and gets released later than a patreon version, but it is for the general public and not the selected group of paying customers. Your latest two comments on that slug game display the situation very well. You need to have a demo on Itch while it is being developed, not after the fact when it is done. People like to accompany the creation of a game. And you need to be specific about what people will get, should they donate/buy here - should you set up a project with a pay what you want button.

Since you are on Steam you are bound by their terms. So no public version. But you can create a downsized free version. And of course you can add a demo on your paid game project page.

As for search "optimisation", remove the clutter from your game's titles. As I said, it is literal search. Every word in your title that is not the title lessens the relevancy overall of the other words. You can put the clutter in the short description that shows up below the title.

Actual search is capped at abou 60 results. You need to select tags in the tag search box. I stumbled about this too. It read Search for games, but it should read Search for game titles. Yeah, yeah, it noe also shows search for tags, but this only adds to the confusion. It does search for suggested tags. It does not search for game by tags. So if you searh https://itch.io/search?type=games&q=turn-based it will show you the related tags 

Turn-based

Turn-Based Combat

Turn-based Strategy

Card Game

plus games that have this in their title.

my games do not show up but many others in my genre do so

What do you think, the main page is?

And how do you "search" for your games?

The main page is https://itch.io/ and the two lists there are fresh and featured. And the only nsfw marked games you will find there are of the horror type. They are curated lists and getting on them is not something you can pay for, as the mod told you.

To see nsfw games, you need to browse and search for them while being logged in, and having nsfw content activated. If you open a private window to test search your games, you cannot see them.

If I search your user name, your games show up fine, so they are indexed and WILL show up, when someone browses for their tags.

Try this one here: https://itch.io/games/tag-transformation/tag-turn-based

The only way for games of your genre to show up on the main page is in the follower and recommendation sections of the main page. And that is user specific.

Also, the search box does not search tags. It searches literal text from the title and maybe the short description. And the developer name. So your game does show up for https://itch.io/search?q=slugs

This is not customer support. This is open community. A message board. You are not talking to Itch support here. You are talking to regular people that are not working for Itch.

No time is a moderator. A community moderator. Not Itch staff. 

The only Itch "staff" you see here has a red admin badge.

So you ask, why games on Itch have links to their Steam appearance, but you do not see games here that link to their GoG appearance?

I am not sure. My guess is, that you would need a finished game to realease it on GoG. The games you see on Itch that push their Steam are usually in the making. They try to get known, they try to self publish and try to get an audience. And steam does have early access. Though, GoG also has early access - but far less reach.

There are games that are on all three. Backpack Hero for example. They do have a link to the wishlist us on Steam. But I see no GoG link.

I am curious, since you used the word content.

Because I just speculated, that people might like to filter by "no-ai-content" instead of "no-ai".

I might even go a step further and claim that many people do not even think about code, when talking about ai generated and filtering out said projects.

tl;dr If this is implemented with tags, consider a tag that encapsules the three content types. Just like "no-ai" encapsules the three content types plus code.

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It will depend on the implementation/user interface to apply the ai filters for browsing.

If people want to browse for "non-ai games" and devs honestly disclose the usage of their helper's outputs, many games might fall under the "ai" branch because of code, but the player browsing for games might not care for mere code, only for art as in pictures and story.

This is a language and definition thing. But in a game, the code is not the content. It is the means to display the content.

There currently are those 4 sub filters to positivly select ai content.

1 AI Generated Graphics 2  AI Generated Sound AI 3 Generated Text & Dialog 4 AI Generated Code

"no-ai" is  !(1||2 ||3||4)

"no-ai-artworks" would be !(1||2)

"no-ai-content" would be  !(1||2||3) - on the basis that code is not content.

My point is, people browsing for assets would use "no-ai" to select apropriate assests for their no-ai project. Or select the positive sub tags for their AI-containing project.

But people browsing for games might prefer "no-ai-content". If there is only the full "no-ai" filter they would  filter out lots of games that feature only human made art, but might fall under ai because of code.

I mean, people already use full engines to deliver their content. Coding is just not the same as content and art. I do not see much discussion about people wanting to filter out all the games that use a game engine, or code made with help of generative ai. But I do see people wanting to not play games that have AI pictures and AI story writing.

human creations being unfairly penalized for perceived resemblance to AI

That they trained the models by real artworks does mean, that there are people out there that can and do create artworks that look like that...

I worry more about the code AI disclosure. In software development, AI tools were embraced more than they were shunned like in visual art. At least this is my impression. It is quite normal to import code snippets from elsewhere and modify them. Creating that snippet with a llm, instead of spending hours on dedicated message boards and documentations sounds like it would be business as usual and not even be perceived as the evil AI usage everyone is talking about.

To ban (generative) AI, it would have to be illegal to begin with. Banning it because some people do not like the concept or call it unfair or whatever would open the door to banning things for all kinds of reasons. When digital art creation was beginning to emerge, there also was a step that created unfair advantages. Imagine a place where art would be banned, because it was not done with pencil on paper, but with pixels and a program that would automatically fill in colors in a place.

Anyway, ther reason stated in the quality guidelines currently reads like this: legal ambiguity around rights associated with Generative AI content

If you sell an asset, that is a thing to be used in a thing that is to be sold yet again. If the legal situation has ambiguities and you do not know, if the asset you bought gives you full rights in the future for the content in said assets, that is a problem. Worst case, you try to make merchandise from your successful game and the genAI content you bought resembles an actual IP, since it was trained from data that containted that IP.

So I fully understand and welcome disclosure for products that are to be used in other products.

As for disclosure of AI in games, I would very much like to know what Steam does with that info or plans to do. They do collect the info since summer I believe. But I have yet to see a game description on Steam that told me, that a game uses genAI content. Maybe I just missed those. There also does not seem to be a filter option to not show games that have genAI.

What would be of course not ok, is to brag about hand made pixel art and whatnot, while the game is genAI. That is like selling organic food that ain't.