Within the last hour I’ve had 16 individual downloads of my paid games without payments. I have a total of 22 games. 16 games are pay to download only (although you can play them in the browser). I know that this is not someone who has purchased them and re-downloading as 3 of the games have never had a purchase. I have had this happen in the past (many times) but never 16 all in one go. It also seems very strange that I’ve had 16 total downloads (of 16 individual games), yet only 14 site views (5 for 1 game alone), and only 2 browser plays. Do the admins or site owners go around systematically downloading games randomly ? Its not as though I make much money from this, I barely sell any anyway. But looking at the stats I’ve had almost 4 times more downloads than I have purchases on some of my games. Is there anything I can do to prevent downloads without purchasing ?

If someone plays the web version of the game through the Itch app, the system counts it as a download.

If you want to have solid statistics, it's best to create separate pages for the web version and the paid version.

What you're saying gives me the idea that someone found one of your games through the Itch app, liked it, and tried the web version of all your games.

They should fix this. It fudges statistics and puts people on edge. There is a thread about this every other month.

Itch.io has a press section.  (Find it under your profile.) I believe it was deactivated for a while due to abuse, but it seems to be active again. If you opt in, people can download your games without paying in order to review them. (But there's no proof that the people are actually going to review them. )

As far as I know, that's the only system that lets someone download your game without paying for it.

==============