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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel like... I am glad the developer is getting paid to do what he does best. Earning a living wage from it. Please appreciate what they've done. Not everything closed is evil oracle megacorp endeavor.

I am 100% ok with Pico-8 being closed. It's a fucking game engine, not a crypto library. I am a fan of FOSS, but I often see people demand and feel entitled for free stuff. This is wrong.

Once in a while, sit back and enjoy what people create without a slightest bit of dissapointment, entitlement, itch to make mods and hack it, etc. It will bring happiness and peace. Look at it from a different way - it's someone's unadulterated, unbikeshedded vision of what a tiny game engine should be. No PR drama, he doesn't need to answer hundreds of angry assholes on Github, ... I think its beautiful.

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I do find the closed nature of the project problematic, but not for the reason you list: if I invest many hours into making games on the platform I want to be sure that I'll still be able to run them easily 10 years from now.

Hopefully if the author ever decides to stop working on the project they'll release the source code for the community to keep it alive.

Even if the author released sources you would not get any guarantee the games can run easily. There needs to be a community that is familiar with the source and keeps maintaining it.

There are a lot of game engine like projects on Github with full code available that are anything but easily runnable on modern operating systems.

It wouldn't be a silver bullet but it would at least make it possible. See Flash for instance: I'm sure there would be enough interest to maintain a FLOSS fork of the Flash player but it's not possible without reverse-engineering it and reimplementing it from scratch.

i am glad the developer is getting paid, and i'm abstractly thrilled at the success of pico-8, which looks like a very nice project and has from all accounts spawned a fun game dev and gamer community around it. i enjoy reading articles about it, and about the people in the community. i just can't bring myself to personally care about using it, though.

this has nothing to do with feeling entitled to get things for free, it's more an internal feeling that computing has divided itself into an interesting and vibrant ecosystem of open source software, and proprietary products that are in some sense the equivalent of a neighbourhood diner - they might actually be very nice, and are surely of interest to people who live in said neighbourhood, but they are never going to be relevant to me in any real way. being closed just sucks all the excitement out of things - i can, as you say, sit back and enjoy it the way i would a piece of art, but i can't summon up any enthusiasm about using it.

(if there were a book about it i would totally buy and read that, though; i do enjoy the fact of its existence and the community around it, and stories about its development and growth continue to be fascinating.)

> if there were a book about it i would totally buy and read that

Except if the book wasn't open source then it "suck all the excitement out of things?

Do you refuse to play all games that aren't open source? Don't watch movies unless they are open source?

There isn't much to Pico-8 in terms of runtime. The LUA you write is yours and I'm confident if you really wanted to use it somewhere else it wouldn't take more then a few days to repo the features. There just isn't that much there. A few draw commands, some input, and audio functions. What's to lose?

The entire package, loaders, editors, exporters, etc is a lot of work but you're no losing anything by writing games in it.

no, i happily read books, and watch movies etc. and like i said i really do appreciate the artistry behind pico-8, and the community, and i will happily consume it as passive entertainment in the form of blog posts and articles and a book should there ever be one. i'm just not excited about it as a personal creative outlet, which does not mean i'm not happy that other people are.

The format is documented and there are open source "emulators", as well as (many) other Fantasy consoles like Tic-80 and Quadplay that are also open source. Even if you don't want to use Pico-8 for moral reasons, if you have an interest in fantasy consoles, there are many FOSS options. It appears like you aren't really trying, and just complaining about Pico-8. I'm sure you had no problem finding an open source text editor, open source OS, open source compiler, etc. Do some research, or alternatively admit you actually don't care about fantasy consoles or game development, and are here to complain about random software being closed source.

i'm not complaining about it, i was just answering the grandparent's comment about why some people might want pico-8 to be open other than "entitlement". there's no moral element to it either.

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