Thanks for the reply. So, is it normal for new games to be flagged as threats by virus scanners? Does that put users off, or is it a known phenomenon?
Viewing post in Virus alert during download
No, it is not normal. But it happens, and it even happens for well known engines.
And one should never disable virus scanners, especially not because the source where you downloaded something tells you so. So, yeah, it will freak out a lot of users, and rightly so. If the game is so badly coded and compiled that even the operating system scanner triggers, that is not a good sign.
Plus, there is a lot of actual malware uploaded to Itch. So people better be careful.