So the guy who wrote it can pay his rent? I'd love for him to share the source code, but I'm happy to pay for it.

I hope you mean free as freedom. I'm not surprised that Pico is not open source. It's still in development and author is really careful about design and building a community around it. Pico is such a creative environment thanks to its limitations and last thing community needs is fifty incompatible forks that would change pallete, resolution or token limit :)

In the all things considered category it's very inexpensive at $15 for all the stuff that you get. Compared to some movies (ticket, popcorn and a drink at almost twice the cost) I've had much more fun with PICO-8.

For $30 you can get a C.H.I.P computer, game pad AND a copy of Pico-8. So you can go retro on tiny hardware.

There's more to pico8 than just a bit of software. There's a community, a games database, updates and support. The alternative is ad based revenue, and quite frankly I and possibly others wouldn't use pico if it were ad based.

You're also free to sell your software, which you cant even do with unity without a royalty.

Are you willing to pay his rent for it to be free software?