Two days ago, an author requested all of their games to be taken down from the Homebrew Hub, a project to preserve all non-commercial homebrew software created for the GB, GBC and GBA family of consoles. This included the only remaining public copy of said author’s gbcompo23 submission, “The Host”, which placed fourth in the competition. However, as the competition’s rules held that works submitted to it should remain available to the public in some fashion, this led to a dispute.

As someone who cares about the state of homebrew development, I foolishly got involved in the dispute after Antonio Vivace, the organizer of gbcompo and operator of Homebrew Hub, reached out to me. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Two days have passed. I’ve received a few dozen total downvotes, some thoughtful criticism, and read a few concerning pieces of misinformation. As such, I’d like to make my perspective on this clear.

To clarify, I am not an organizer of gbcompo23 or gbcompo25. I was not involved with them in any manner. I was and am speaking purely in a personal capacity - my opinion was requested purely as that of a friend.

For the sake of completeness, I am linking the game author’s statement on the dispute. If the gbcompo staff releases a statement, I will also link it. I recommend reading those first to get a more informed look on the matter.

The Bad

Let’s start with the bad.

As part of Antonio asking me about how to handle this dispute, I loudly pondered the idea of demanding a return of the reward money. While I did not recommend doing it in the end and I was working off of incomplete information, I feel that even entertaining this idea has contributed to causing damage which should not have taken place, given that almost two years have passed since the payout and that the human impact of enforcing this would greatly outweigh any potential outcome.

I regret what I said and will try to be more cautious in the future.

The Dispute

I ultimately recommended immediately removing all works in question while imposing either retroactive or future disqualification, acknowledging that choosing the former will most likely lead to the dispute becoming a public affair. This occured in public - in the #homebrew-hub channel on the GBdev Discord. After talking to me, Antonio chose to retroactively disqualify the creator’s games and asked for the money to be refunded, then proceeded to work on getting them out of the public website. As I stated above, I now believe that requesting the refund, no matter how well intentioned, was a bad decision, and I regret having my hand in it.

Nevertheless, I continue to stand with the decision of disqualification. To bring up the exact rule I consider violated:

The submission must be available for free for the public (and not only the judges). Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website, while you are free to keep working on it (and eventually charge for it/make commercial usage).

To address a common point - I agree that this rule is really poorly written and leaves a lot to personal interpretation. Someone on Reddit suggested that it is deliberate tricky wordplay, which means the organizers probably at least have a lawyer on retainer. I consider that to be a bad faith read of the situation; usually, highly imprecise wording implies the lack of a lawyer, and I am certain that is the case here as well. Read the text of any major software license or terms of service agreement - most of them are quite precise about the rights granted and requirements imposed, if in a bit peculiar and terse in the specific language used. Usually, the vagueness there is hidden in not disclosing intent, as these documents are typically written with the interests of the side commissioning them in mind.

In his post, the game author claims, thrice, that the games were online for the entire required period and even well beyond. However, the rules never specified a period in the first place, and I find myself wondering where the idea that one was implied to be limited to the competition’s duration came from. Can one be assumed? My personal position stems from observing the historical and cultural context.

The Game Boy homebrew community descends directly from the subculture of demoscene - Anthrox was a demoscene and game cracking group which Pan was a member of, and it was under its name that the Pan Docs were first released and distributed on warez BBSes in early 1995. Throughout the demoscene, it is fairly customary for all competition works to be freely distributed online through a network of independent mirrors - see, for example, the rules of the party Evoke or Silly Venture. This rule, of course, does not extend to any later releases or derivative works - for example, the group Dekadence makes it clear that they consider any unauthorized YouTube uploads of their recent works, for example Ihmesorsa, to be an infringement of their copyright:

This production may NOT be distributed in video form without our explicit permission. Contact us at dekadencedemo@gmail.com BEFORE making your video capture public, or we will issue a takedown.

Similarly, many other homebrew game jams have traditionally had a clear expectation of the submitted works being avaialble for free in perpetuity. Take the NESdev compo, one of the longest running such game jams. It ends with all ranked and judged entries being bundled into a single NES ROM with a custom multicart mapper, which is then distributed by the organizers. An author may opt out from this by submitting to a second category with looser restrictions, but doing so makes their entry ineligible for ranking.

I hold the belief that it is in this spirit that the rule was written, and discussions with inhabitants of the GBdev Discord appear to validate my belief. The weak wording is, in my opinion, a matter of falsely assuming this to be a common cultural norm. Said phrasing, if taken literally, may even have some unintended side effects. The competition website is not, technically speaking, the author’s own submission page - however, linking to it gives them more eyeballs and allows a space for reaching out to interested players directly.

With this in mind, I continue to hold it is unfair to benefit - especially financially - from a community effort, then turn your back on said community. Unfair does not mean prohibited - copyright law does apply here, and the Homebrew Hub was never the competition’s website either. However, I don’t think one can violate a competition’s spirit and expect no bridges to be burned in the process, as made evident by the people who have reached out to me in support of the disqualification.

To clarify, though - I’m talking about the specific expectation of taking down all access to the version of the game as was submitted to the jam. There is nothing wrong with commercializing an entry and never has been - for example, from the same competition:

• Hermano by Pat Morita Team, the first place winner of gbcompo23, makes the jam version freely available, while a later, expanded version requires payment to access. This was never an issue, and the expanded version was never distributed on Homebrew Hub or by the gbcompo organizers.
• Feed IT Souls by Gumpy Function, the second place winner of gbcompo23, does the same thing: free jam version, paid post-jam version. This was never an issue, and the expanded version was similarly never distributed on Homebrew Hub or by the gbcompo organizers. The same is true for BenJelter and Gumpy Function’s 2021 winner, Unearthed.
• Enceladus by mr.papshmir, the third place winner of gbcompo23, can only be played for free on itch.io through a web emulator, with the official download of even the jam version there requires payment to access. This was never an issue, albeit with the caveat that the gbdev.io copy of the jam version hosted on Homebrew Hub does remain available for now.

None of these creators were prevented from making money from the effort they put into the jam. That would have been obviously unfair. I have no issue with any of that. What makes allalonegamez’s case distinct is that they demanded that the jam version of his game become unavailable to the public period, while refusing to even engage with any argument to the contrary. I consider that to be a breach of the social contract between the GB/GBC homebrew community - which is not just its developers! - and the game’s developer, even if it technically allowed by law.

Is it fair to these other developers, who have chosen not to take down their jam versions, possibly because they believed it was required of them to keep them up? Is it fair to the individual donators to the prize pool, who may have made the decision to support the competition based on the understanding that this contributes to a future library of freely accessible works? Is it fair to the judges, who spent days working for free, sifting through over a hundred entries, potentially with the same assumption at play? Are they not equal members of the community? I can’t know that - I’ll have to wait for some of them to speak their minds, if any decide to do so.

The Ugly

As I discussed this matter with other people from the community, I have learned that this was not the first grievance directed at the staff of gbcompo, and decided to look into a few more, for the sake of completeness if nothing else.

One issue some people have with them is accepting a sponsorship offer of hardware worth 2280 USD in retail from the FPGA-based console reimplementation seller ModRetro, controversial for being owned and operated by a military-industrial complex beneficiary and entrepreneur. As I understand it, this decision was thoroughly discussed internally, but I am nevertheless disappointed to see the leaders of a community of hobbyist creativity lend its reputation to this kind of business.

Another issue some people raised is the organizer team having allowed art produced using generative AI models under condition of full disclosure, applying the same rules for it as for any pre-made assets. I am more ambivalent here. Obviously, it makes them scabs in the ongoing labor dispute, that much is undeniable, and I know many people for whom this alone is unforgivable. However, I also understand that they prioritized being able to understand how many people are opting to use LLM-derived material and giving the judges the transparency required to adjust their scoring accordingly, as opposed to potentially rewarding someone for fraudulent work whose provenance they did not disclose. Personally, I’m not sure if this was the right way to go about it.

On a separate note, this is also not the first time the GB/GBC homebrew community has been divided. There are three major Discord guilds dedicated to its efforts, not one - GBdev, GBDK, and GB Studio. I think it’s important context to remark that the community of GBdev has managed to alienate both GBDK and GB Studio thought leaders in the past with its opinions. Even if some of the opinions held have changed or the people have mellowed out since, the drama scars remain.

In this vein, I’ve heard some people privately accuse the GB Studio community of bringing “money people” into the mix. I find that to be a concerning mindset which encourages a kind of elitism and gatekeeping that I personally dislike and that the community of GB Studio creators had to face in the past. Conversely, I’ve heard some people accuse the gbcompo organizers of being aligned with the “money people”. That doesn’t hold up to scrutiny to me, either! All gbcompo expenses and donations are public information - I don’t think any of the organizers make money from this event.

This section would not be complete without bringing up the factor of personal privilege. It’s easy to hold such strong opinions for the people of GBdev and myself, who are largely employed in the tech sector and don’t need to worry about putting food on the table. Would I hold such stances were I not so fortunate? It’s really hard to say; I dare not guess.

The Disappointing

I expect future homebrew competitions to take clearer stances here. For example, the upcoming N64brew Jam has already clarified its relevant rule yesterday, in part due to this dispute (added clarification in bold):

5️⃣ The final game’s source must be publicly available on GitHub (IE Open Source), but you are free to license it as you wish (GPL, BY-NC-ND, etc…). You must allow that we keep a copy of your submission’s source code publicly available in perpetuity.

Nevertheless, even if the broader homebrew community extends beyond its creators, it is only the creators who make or break a jam. They will decide if such rules are acceptable or not, by participating in specific events or by avoiding others. It’s not like the GB/GBC community has no alternatives. Maybe the times are changing. Maybe I’m just out of touch.

I have been contributing to various homebrew and modding communities for over 15 years, including experimenting with GB Studio for a time. Likewise, I have been contributing to the preservation of homebrew for many years. I have done almost all of this work for free, without expecting compensation and often under highly permissive terms. This was always done with the underlying belief in a shared cultural commons that is being built by doing so. In my view, people were free to not donate to these commons if they did not want to for whatever reason. I generally had no issue with someone charging money for something built on top of it, at least where license terms were not infringed. I was happy to see more and more games receive commercial releases from various boutique manufacturers. However, I do take issue with someone taking away something once provided to these commons. People in retro gaming spaces cherish every piece of so-called “lost media” that is found and made available, no matter the means - why must we create more of it?

This dispute, and people’s reactions to it, show me that this framework of belief is not as universal as I had hoped. If people can revoke things from the cultural commons at will, then it is not something built, but ephemeral. As such, a different interpretation becomes tempting - one which I’ve occasionally argued with myself about many times in the past. Through its lens, my choice to give away my labor is not part of building a community, but mere evidence that I am not capable of creating something people in general would want to pay for, or that I am wasting my skills and time by not monetizing my users and instead contributing to something “greater than myself”. That is one disheartening realization to ponder, and not one I would like to agree with. It is, of course, not the full story and just an extreme position - albeit one which feels bolstered by the events of yesterday.

To be clear, what I put out into the public and under what terms is my decision only. It is my labor and I own it, just like how the gbcompo contestants’ labor is their own and they own it. In all cases, we have to accept the consequences of our choices - the good and the bad. I’m not seeking words of sympathy - I just want to state my feelings about this. I don’t think this is a dispute in which my stance is necessarily correct. You are welcome to agree or disagree, to back me or to vilify me. In the end, I’d like to think that none of this will affect my motivation for giving away more of my labor in the future, but I don’t trust myself to be that selfless. I’ll try my best, though.