itch.io

I raised it as a possibility, and I still think it’s plausible

That's not raising a possibilty. That's a baseless accusation.

Including the possibility that the popularity is real

I must have missed that. You did your best to explain ways how they would be not real.

Popularity can be faked, and is faked all the time.

We talking about Itch projects here. I have seen someone here who I saw how the popularity was faked. It was done by simple f4f and might not be seen as fake. But this did not result in sales in that example. It might have resulted in short term popularity, I did not check that.

So I am fully aware that there is empty popularity that does not translate into sales. And that is why I cited actual sale figures. Because those are not easily faked or explained away. On that bundle sale I linked for that other developer are 800 buyers and 400 followers. Those followers are not the empty kind. There are no indicators, as we can see factual sales happening with more than twice that number.

This particular AI output clearly is slop. I mean, just look at it

Then I can tell by the pixels? That what you mean?

That asset creator is so sloppy that there are even updates for the slop. It is pixel art. What am I supposed to see? There is only circumstancial hints that it is made with help of gen ai. I can tell for a lot of images and bigger character images, that they have the ai look. But something with so few pixels is very hard to tell. I do not see consistency problems that would hint at ai or other signs. So what in the images clearly tells you that this is ai?

We do not know how much hand edited those assets are. That the developer does updates for some of those packs tells me, that this is not 1-pass ai slop. There are iterations. Refinement. Combined with the many followers in comparison to other ai asset creators, yes, that is not the slop type of ai creator. There is one asset from 2024 and if you dig, you can find that in 2025 there were also assets released that are now removed. Unless you now claim that the asset pack from 2024 is a blatant lie and also gen ai created, we can assume that this person knows how create such assets manually.

AI in the hands of someone skilled in both ai and the craft the ai should do, can do wonders. My best guess is, that after initial tests that dev migrated to an ai assisted workflow and does this now fulltime. 

The ai slop I see is when people not skilled in one or often both of those skills release projects.