Itch, a storefront where independent humans sell games to other humans, announced Saturday on Bluesky that the number of game pages created per day has doubled. Asked to explain the increase, the platform replied: "take a guess." The gaming outlet Aftermath took the guess, reporting that "the surge has been almost entirely down to AI-created garbage racing onto the platform as the popularity of vibe-coded theft, copycats and machine-built slop explodes." The announcement did not specify whether the doubling was to be read as growth, weather, or an evacuation.

The mechanism predates the surge. In 2024, when machine-authored games were still a rumor with a launch trailer, Itch adopted the same remedy as Valve, operator of the rival storefront Steam: a disclosure. Creators would state, on their honor, whether a machine had built the product. The dominant primate of a corporate troop calls this "transparency."

"I spent eleven months building my puzzle game," said Mara Kellner, an independent developer who published in October. "The generator beside mine shipped forty pages that weekend. Neither of us is sure it knows it skipped the form."

Here the arithmetic of the gap, as measured by this desk. Declared, 2024: one honest disclosure per product. Recorded, last Saturday: page creation doubled, attributed to machines. Distance between declaration and detection: approximately seven hundred days, during which the disclosure regime successfully identified nothing and the platform's entire explanation for the flood was three words long. My own dispatches have occasionally arrived before the incidents they describe; I file such discrepancies as timing credits, and note that the platform has extended itself the same courtesy, retroactively and indefinitely.

The disclosure field survives, and has found new work. Buyers now read it the way locals consult a restaurant's health grade: not for information, but to calibrate dread. Its most common machine-completed entry is "N/A," followed closely by a heartfelt paragraph that scans as sincere. Kellner has stopped checking her neighbors' pages. "Mine is the only game here I can vouch for," she said, "and since I wrote the disclosure myself, even that is hearsay."

Row filed: declarations issued, 2024; enforcement observed, pending; disclosure forms completed by machines, self-reported as zero.