I never get that many downloads, specially on games I haven't updated for more than a year. Which is fine and expected.

But sometimes I suddenly get a spike with weird number of downloads specially when there doesn't seem to be any spike in views. The number of download is also weird because its always 12 and always happen on this one game. It has led me to trust the analytics less and less because of that. It just looks like a bug or bots or something.

Today however, the spike I'm seeing is of 100 downloads on two different games. 100 on 29th on one game. And 100 on 30th on the other game. 

Is it some quirk of the analytics system, a bug or botting? Either way I think it should be fixed, otherwise the stats are not that helpful.

I don't think it's a bug, although it's possible. I've seen several similar reports, and I'm more inclined to think it's a new form of attack on Itch.

A few weeks ago, there were quite a few DDoS and bot attacks, which is why Itch had to implement much stricter security measures. If you read the forum, you'll see that these measures are affecting several users.

Personally, I'm inclined to think that the attacker or attackers behind those attacks found another way to try to overwhelm Itch's servers, bypassing Cloudfire's defenses.

To be clear, this is just my personal theory.

I had the same happen to me today, 100 downloads, very few views. 

Same issue here too

Same here and it didn't stop :(

Strange. Poking around, I don’t find a commonality between your games or creator pages. This is happening at random?

This has been happening to my games (except for the currently quarantined one by the way, which was another clue besides the lack of any view that the downloads were likely automated and/or by a single person so likely for harmful reasons) for a few days too.

The download counter counts started downloads, not finished downloads.

A single user with a faulty connection can cause hundreds of those "downloads". Likely some download managers might inflate those numbers as well. Those might help on a unstable connection.

Same thing happening to me, 10 views today, 100 downloads.