There is a topic like this about every week. Someone either asking why their game is unnoticed or asking how to promote their game.
One should not forget, that this is Itch. The whole platform is basically unknown. It has 1.2 million projects in the game category. But only about 250k of them are good enough to have some attention. About 60k of them are good enough to collect money.
So you asking why your game(s) are in the 950k, instead of the 250k of the games... meh. Who knows. It certainly does not help that you have an Android only game or feature AI. But even without that, it is unlikely that your game(s) would be in the 250k. Most of those other 950000 games are probably not bad either.
As long as you have fun creating games, all good.
For the other topic, and "evidence" how players view AI, citing the opinion of a former director of a studio is not exactly evidence. AI is not that old. How about some actual data on the platform we are currently talking. Maybe this is possible to see. AI games are relatively new, so I wish I could have used the 2025 category, but this does not exist yet. So I will use the last 30 days filter. We will use ai graphics, because that's what people notice the easiest.
https://itch.freezing.top/games/top-rated/last-30-days/tag-ai-generated-graphics
https://itch.freezing.top/games/top-rated/last-30-days/tag-no-ai
| 2660 | 28 |
| 2182 | 30 |
| 1097 | 7 |
| 223 | 6 |
| 122 | 9 |
| 111 | 14 |
| 107 | 5 |
| 255 | 4 |
| 470 | 4 |
| 131 | 9 |
| 62 | 5 |
| 59 | 5 |
| 78 | 3 |
| 40 | 3 |
| 85 | 3 |
| 62 | 3 |
| 37 | 3 |
| 56 | 3 |
| 49 | 3 |
| 80 | 3 |
Those figures are the amount of ratings and the order is weighted, so that more ratings will appear higher, even if the average is slightly lower. But from the number of ratings you can conclude interaction by players and evidently how they like those games.
I think that's rather devastating for games with AI. Granted, that's not proof of causality. It could be influenced by other factors and likely is. But the bottom line is, if you release a game and have AI graphics, people are less likely to play and subsequently like it.
Those other factors might include people not liking AI, the AI graphics looking cheap and bland, overall lack of production value since the developer had no budget to hire an artist, or things like people releasing games who are not game developers, but just made a thing for fun and those projects are in the same lists as professional games.