There's been a lot of drama recently surrounding PICO-8 games being turned into NFTs and then being sold on the GameStop NFT market...all without permission from the creators. One of my games got caught up in the mix and it's a shitty scenario across the board.
Ars Technica published a feature this morning highlighting the whole ordeal. It's a good overview of the drama with interviews from @zep and other creators that had their games hijacked. Worth a read for everyone that makes games here and something to keep an eye out for in the future.
Zep has been working hard deal with a lot of it and helping to get them off the GameStop market. Huge thanks to him for all his effort on this situation. It's not fun for anyone but he's certainly taken a lead role.
I've helped out where I could in regards to dealing with this problem but I chose not to get too involved otherwise. It's shitty that someone took my work and cashed in on it, but at the end of the day it's not taking any bread off of my table. I'm not going after legal action or anything that hardcore so I'm squarely on the "it's the principle of the thing" side of the coin.
This is not a thing and it will continue to be a thing, I'm guessing. Someone has proven you can turn our games into NFTs and cash in. Expect more and keep your eyes out.
A game I wrote years ago got caught up in that mess, @morningtoast. One that I was monetizing on Itch.IO as well.
It's frustrating, I don't know what can be done except - be vigilant, be wary, and keep an eye out on gaming sites to make sure no unauthorized selling of other people's Pico-8 games is taking place.
When you post your game, on this screen HERE:
Be certain LICENSE is CHECKMARKED and EMBED is NOT.
If you checkmark EMBED and find your game on another site, you may not have much recourse to do anything, yet if you specifically stated your game cannot be embedded on another site, you can write them to take it down.
For more information on this copyright, go HERE.
Regarding the license thing: from my understanding, a game with no license isn't a game that's free to resell commercially, it's a game that you can't redistribute at all. If you didn't give blanket permission for strangers to sell your stuff, then they have no right to sell their stuff - and the fact that the NFT community facilitates these interactions is disgusting but unsurprising.
The thing about licenses is that they're just legal agreements. Licensing to the public means that anyone can enter into the agreement if they like the terms, but if someone hasn't licensed their work to the public then any agreements have to be negotiated individually. At that point, any rights that fall under copyright are based on the individual country, as are any exceptions. That part in the article about the public domain license is referring to use of the "Unlicense" license which is the result of people putting no thought into the consequences of naming. To summarize, that license is a sloppier version of CC0.
Hi all, I've a question. The guys who have been illegally selling NFT from games made in PICO-8, did it using the .p8 file downloaded from the pico-8 BBS or from windows, mac or linux binaries?
What if, in your game code, you clearly state that it is forbidden to create an NFT with it?
I really don't know how NFTs are created, hence my doubt.
Thanks!
Best regards
I think they took the PICO-8 HTML+JS code, and the game JS code too, so that they could pretend that the ntfs were not just worthless artificially scarce receipts to a URL but real things, by letting people play the game in their browser or «wallet» program.
These people don’t respect licenses and don’t engage in good faith, so a note in the code would have as little effect as the license terms that were already there.
Yes, I don't think they would respect a message that says it can't be used as NFTs
Unfortunately this whole thing has soured the concept of posting anything I'm working on. At least it'll be interesting portfolio filler
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