Hi all!

I'm one of the developers of Agora, an open-source project that allows anyone to sell files online.

Anyone can run Agora and host their own file store, and we also host our own instance at agora.download.

We would like to have special support for PICO-8 cartridges on Agora, and make the experience of buying and playing carts on Agora instances really good. We're very early in the process of supporting PICO-8 carts, and as a first step we need carts we can host.

Since we're not game developers ourselves, we wanted to reach out to the community here and see if anyone was interested in selling their carts on agora.download. We offer an 80%/20% revenue split, i.e. the cartridge author would keep 80% of the revenue, we would keep 20%.

Since this is an experiment, we're most interested in hosting and selling carts that are already written, and have no problem hosting carts that are freely available elsewhere. This wouldn't be any kind of exclusive agreement, and you could just ask us to stop hosting your carts at any time.

If you're interested, email us at casey at rodarmor.com and soenkehahn at gmail.com!

If you have any questions, I'm also super happy to answer them here.

Casey

I'm not the target audience for this since no one would likely willingly pay for my carts and the appeal of cryptocurrency is lost on me, so take my comments with the appropriately-sized grain of salt:

I checked out the Github and this all sounds waaaaaaay more complicated than just uploading a game to itch.io instead. Having to worry about channels, and managing wallets and inbound liquidity that you have to buy from some other third party to make sure you have enough, then once you're paid in bitcoin, having to manage some other way of turning that into spendable cash vs. click button, upload ZIP, set price (with a default but adjustable split of 90/10), publish, get money in Paypal. I guess I wonder what the value-add here is? And again, I could just be a moron about all this, so I'm not judging the merit of the idea for anyone but myself.

> I'm not the target audience for this since no one would likely willingly pay for my carts

Don't sell yourself short! One particular advantage of Agora is since we avoid traditional payment processors, we don't have any kind of fixed fee, so prices can be very low, like 25¢ or less, so it's possible that we could open up a market for very simple or experimental carts that wouldn't be possible to sell on itch.io because they use payment processors that charge a minimum 30¢ or more.

> and the appeal of cryptocurrency is lost on me, so take my comments with the appropriately-sized grain of salt:

I think your comments are totally reasonable, more below.

> I checked out the Github and this all sounds waaaaaaay more complicated than just uploading a game to itch.io instead. Having to worry about channels, and managing wallets and inbound liquidity that you have to buy from some other third party to make sure you have enough, then once you're paid in bitcoin, having to manage some other way of turning that into spendable cash vs. click button, upload ZIP, set price (with a default but adjustable split of 90/10), publish, get money in Paypal. I guess I wonder what the value-add here is? And again, I could just be a moron about all this, so I'm not judging the merit of the idea for anyone but myself.

This is all totally true. We have a few value-adds:

• If you don't want to mess with running your own Agora instance, you can have us host your content on our Agora instance, in which case you wouldn't need to worry about hosting, managing channels, etc. We would still have to figure out a way for us to pay you, but that should be manageable.

• You can't self-host itch.io, so if you ever wanted to do that, you could do it with Agora. It's not for the faint of heart, but it can be done, and might be appealing for larger publishers as a way of avoiding payment processor fees.

• Since Agora has no minimum, fixed fee, prices can be very low. As I mentioned before, you could charge 25¢, 10¢, or less than a cent for an experimental cart, which I think wouldn't be possible on itch.io.

• As far as I can tell, itch.io itself isn't open source, whereas Agora is, so if you wanted to run your own itch.io, with your own games, or other peoples games, you could. We want people to run their own Agora instances, so we would love the competition!

totally misses the point:

• pico8 bbs is already about publishing experimental carts for free
• pico8 is about low friction (can Aurora host a cart in less than 5 minutes?)
• low price? meaning that 10000’s of crypto users would be willing to pay for a (very) small game? That totally doesn’t match with crypto-currency demographics. Short of that, that’s a lot if hassle to earn 10$!

Suggest to study the pico8 market a bit more…

> pico8 is about low friction (can Aurora host a cart in less than 5 minutes?)

Agora is a work-in-progress. It's a manual process now, but we could potentially make hosting a new cart as simple as dragging and dropping the PNG onto the website. Export from PICO-8, drag and drop on website, done.

> low price? meaning that 10000’s of crypto users would be willing to pay for a (very) small game?

It's an experiment. You can charge a low price for your cart and hope a lot of people buy it, or a high price and hope a few people buy it.

> That totally doesn’t match with crypto-currency demographics.

Not current demographics. But the Lightning Network, which Agora uses to process payments, is a growing payment network, built on Bitcoin, that allows fast, low-fee payments. We hope that as usage of the network expands, there will be more and more potential customers for Agora instances.

There should be a rule against posting advertisements for crypto on the bbs.

> There should be a rule against posting advertisements for crypto on the bbs.

This isn't an advertisement for crypto. This is information about open source, freely licensed software for selling content, that happens to use crypto for payment. We run an instance, and so could anyone else.

Additionally, we're trying to provide another avenue for game developers to get paid. Being able to buy a game for less than $1 on a website that you don't have to sign into, over an open payment network, is a legitimate technological advance, that we hope will help more artists get paid for their work.

The OP literally was like "you can upload anything, including free carts, for sale". Like 2bitchuck said, there is nothing about this that makes sense to someone who could just sell their carts on itch.io unless they specifically want to get in on the cryptocurrency bubble.

This is definitely an attempt to sell a cryptocurrency thing to the PICO-8 community. Add my voice to the collection of those uncomfortable with that.

> The OP literally was like "you can upload anything, including free carts, for sale". Like 2bitchuck said, there is nothing about this that makes sense to someone who could just sell their carts on itch.io unless they specifically want to get in on the cryptocurrency bubble.

Things that you can do with Agora that you can't do with itch.io:

• Self-host. You can self-host an Agora instance. You can't self-host an itch.io instance.
• Modify the code. The itch.io codebase is private. The Agora codebase is public and permissively licensed.
• Charge small amounts without taking a huge hit to earnings.

From itch.io's site:

> For most PayPal transactions, a fee of $0.30 + 2.9% is applied per transaction. Depending on your account here may be additional fees for currency conversion when receiving funds into your account.

> For most credit card transactions, Stripe takes a fee of $0.30 + 2.9%.

This means that it is impossible to charge less than 30¢ for something on itch.io.

This is an experiment and might not work, but you can do things with it that you can't do on itch.io.

In fact, it's an exceedingly bad way to "get in on the cryptocurrency bubble". If you want to "get in on the cryptocurrency bubble", then you should just buy Bitcoin. Selling things on Agora is obviously much more work and much less certain.

Nobody's going to buy a game that costs 30 cents. The moment people see that price tag, they're going to assume the game is crap. Furthermore, there's no benefit to self-hosting a store page. That just makes it less likely anyone will see your games. Unless you're also advertising the games, your cut is still really high.

> Nobody's going to buy a game that costs 30 cents. The moment people see that price tag, they're going to assume the game is crap.

Tons of people buy $1 phone games, and that's the minimum price on mobile app stores, so they would probably also buy cheaper games if that was an option.

> Furthermore, there's no benefit to self-hosting a store page. That just makes it less likely anyone will see your games.

That's fair, but there's another important benefit: If you decide you don't like us, you can exit. If you decide you don't like itch.io, you have no option to self-host.

> Unless you're also advertising the games, your cut is still really high.

That's fair, I think. Our thinking is that we'd rather start with a high cut and lower it, as opposed to start with a low cut and be forced to raise it, for example if hosting costs are high.

get out of yout reality bubble for 1 second.
1€ phone games are a thing cause there is hundreds of millions of people with a mobile with a regular banking account.
Until crypto-currencies can align to these numbers, you are a niche of a niche.
Eg game will sell 5 copies at 0.1€ each, big deal 🙄.

Same as others, this is spam to me.

> Until crypto-currencies can align to these numbers, you are a niche of a niche.

How can something new become popular without starting out in obscurity? Also, is it wrong to serve a niche?

> Same as others, this is spam to me.

You might not be interested, but this is clearly not spam.

Your proposition is to self-host an agora instance to sell stuff for less than a dollar.

• Self-Hosting costs time and money
• A self-hosted marketplace will have 0 visibility
• All of that to sell games for $0.30 to some cryptobros?

Also, how do I get that money on my bank account? Oh nice it's bitcoin, that means I'll have to burn an entire oil barrel and more than likely STILL have to pay exorbiting fees to get that $0.30 in a real currency.

Stop trying to shove NFTs into everything. They're a scam, and your arguments are laughable.

> Self-Hosting costs time and money
> A self-hosted marketplace will have 0 visibility

You could team up with other people to self host together. Lexaloffle could host an instance for BBS members to sell PICO-8 carts. These things are not options with itch.io

> All of that to sell games for $0.30 to some cryptobros?

The entire nation of El Salvador now has access to a Lightning Network wallet. I could be wrong, but I assume they are not all crypto bros. At they very least, they are cryptohermanos.

> Also, how do I get that money on my bank account? Oh nice it's bitcoin, that means I'll have to burn an entire oil barrel and more than likely STILL have to pay exorbiting fees to get that $0.30 in a real currency.

The Lightning Network has low fees, and scales, so it makes bitcoin much more energy efficient. There are plenty of services to convert Bitcoin to USD in your bank account at low or no cost.

> Stop trying to shove NFTs into everything.

I didn't mention NFTs.

> They're a scam, and your arguments are laughable.

Fortunately, I didn't mention them, so whether or not they're a scam is unimportant.

I'm not sure why you're openly hostile to an option that someone can voluntarily take. I've been fully transparent about the fact that it might not work, and I don't object to your actual criticism, but I think the hostility is misplaced. We're writing open source software, not forcing anyone to do anything, and openly inviting people to compete with us.

@scambier also, just to keep things a little positive, I love your drop game, the animation and effects are on point.

I notice that the itch.io page for hit has a donation button, which I didn't know about.

As an example of a possible benefit of Agora, we could add a donate button instead of paywalling some content, and people could donate tip very small amounts very easily, like 10¢.

And another question: How would people feel if someone from PICO-8 was on board with this? We could help someone technical from the PICO-8 community run their own instance, so it wouldn't even be us running it or directly profiting from it.

I think part of the problem is that I'm an outsider with no history in the community, so people are naturally skeptical.

They could make a PICO-8 only instance, which would be sweet, and could set their own fees, or charge no fees.

@rodarmor Right, my bad for the NFTs, I conflated them with cryptos. But I have the same opinion for both technologies.

The one and only point you get is that yes, it reduces transaction fees (though I have to take your word for it). But people, buyers and sellers, use regular marketplaces because they're willing to pay a fee in exchange of security and convenience.

Now, personal opinions aside ; could this project work? Yes, maybe. But definitely not for pico8 games. The work involved on the seller's part will never be worth the potential benefits.

Finally, writing open source does not shield you for criticism, especially when the underlying technology is - at best - controversial.

> Now, personal opinions aside ; could this project work? Yes, maybe. But definitely not for pico8 games. The work involved on the seller's part will never be worth the potential benefits.

Would a PICO-8 arcade where everything was free, but you could give a donation that went to the cart author during/after you played a cart be more interesting? That might mesh well with the PICO-8 ethos.

> Finally, writing open source does not shield you for criticism, especially when the underlying technology is - at best - controversial.

For sure, I definitely agree about that. I think the reason I keep mentioning that we're open source is that it's a good indication that we're not trying to trap anyone with the copyright of our software, and maybe just slightly less likely that we're trying to do something otherwise nefarious or abusive.

> The work involved on the seller's part will never be worth the potential benefits.

This is a good point that, if we're going to be charging small amounts of money, or mostly receiving very small donations, then we have to make it super easy to upload things.

what even is this, pls get off the bbs thanks

> what even is this, pls get off the bbs thanks

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