I’m flummoxed by this mentality. If Antonio and the team took your recommendation seriously and are trying to enforce it, then both you and the gbdev team don’t actually know what community means.
This stance is harmful to devs, and does not benefit the community or the developers. When I helped organize GB Compo 23, there was no discussion amongst us regarding requiring the ROM to be hosted indefinitely on compo’s website, nor repercussions for redaction.
Shameful.
I’m surprised by this, given that entries for GB Compo 21 have been hosted indefinitely on GitHub since, well, 2021: https://github.com/gbdev/gbcompo21 - the same goes for the 2023 and 2025 iteration. Were you not aware of this?
The same applies to adjacent homebrew competitions: the yearly NESdev competition requires all ranked and judged entries to consent to being included as part of a freely distributed multicart, whereas the N64brew jam has a similar policy of mirroring compo releases on their GitHub.
This also goes outside of homebrew competitions and into demoscene. For example, the largest demoscene party, Revision, states in their rules that all entries presented will be mirrored on scene.org. Another large party, Evoke, explicitly requires contestants to accept that their works will be freely distributed online.
This also goes beyond the West. The Japanese WonderWitch Grand Prix, a hobbyist console game competition that ran from 2001 to 2003, also stipulated consent for free distribution.
I believe that access to games which were the result of a competition co-funded by the community helps the community as a whole grow. The social contract has two sides, not just one, and I think the non-developer side can feel rightly betrayed in this situation.
What exactly does the host of this event lose by de-listing the game? What goodwill are they burning with developers by taking such a harsh stance? I'm seeing a lot of fellow developers upset by this decision and reconsidering participating in the future compos.
Ok, so you've listed some ethical precedents. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of creators who are willing to license their products as shareware, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to. From an archivist perspective, I would much rather there be accurate records kept that acknowledge all entries, even if those entries aren't available to play anymore. I'm literally writing a book about homebrew games made during the early days of the internet, so I know how frustrating it can be for games to disappear to history.
But at the end of the day, it's about a creator wanting to protect their copyright in order to sell it. If the compo truly acknowledges that creators could want to turn their entries into commercial products, then they shouldn't stand in the way when creators want to.
Speaking of social contracts, I just think that non-developers shouldn't have such a demand on the free labor of creators. If they want access to a game, they should pay for it.
I listed precedents in the form of other major competitions which impose similar, or even harsher, requirements on their participants, to explain that this is not an unusual policy for a game jam, especially one with prizes/rewards at play. Yes, everyone who submits their work to these competitions - the NESdev compo, for example - has to either allow distributing their work in this manner, or not submit their work to that specific competition. My stance is specifically that it is not uncommon or unreasonable for an event, especially in the social circles GB/GBC homebrew was born out of, to impose such expectations!
At the end of the day, many freely available GB/GBC games have already been turned into commercial products. You can do this by releasing an expanded version of the game (which has precedent), by putting the same game on a physical cartridge, or even by paywalling ROM downloads but not the web emulator (which another gbcompo entry has done). Even allalonegamez’s own 2025 entry, Zorvad, which is still available on Itch, has had a commercial release announced while still being playable online. The competition has not interfered with any of those - it only stepped in when a game which was entered in the competition was threatened with the possibility of it not being available online at all.
“Speaking of social contracts, I just think that developers shouldn’t have such a demand on the free labor of organizers and judges. If they want their game critiqued and promoted, they should pay for it.” /hj
