I’ve been putting off writing about this because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it and it took some time to work through. Long story short, someone is selling physical copies of Pocket League, the Gameboy game I developed 5 years ago.
If you’re not familiar with Pocket League, it’s a Gameboy demake of Rocket League. I wrote an entire blog series kicking off this blog, which you can find here: Writing a Gameboy Game in 2021
The physical copy is being sold by Swerve Studios – you can find a place to purchase easily enough, though I won’t link it here as that just feels weird to do that. And to be clear, this post isn’t to call out the studio or the developer here, because I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. I want you to see that the product that they have produced is high quality and they’ve put in effort above and beyond my original work. They even introduced a whole new game mode, CGB support, and music, which is awesome!
The thing is, this scenario is totally within their rights. In fact, they didn’t need to do anything to sell my software since I licensed it under MIT License for as long as the project has existed.
After some consideration, there’s were feelings I wasn’t expecting when I saw this being sold. Why didn’t I get any of the rewards from writing that code? Why does someone else get to claim they wrote Pocket League? These feelings are hard to reconcile, and it took me some time to reason through the initial gut reaction I had.
(Yes, I am well aware the answer is literally in the license. This post is about what this feels like as a creator.)
I suppose lots of code creators feel this way. After all, software development is a collaborative activity. I think 5 years ago I was perhaps slightly naive about how software works, the whole “open source is everything”, pick a permissive license and just require attribution (which by all accounts, Swerve has done!). The rubber hits the road once someone starts making money off you work, and I wasn’t anticipating that.
That said, I think I made the right call. I’m financially secure and a few extra bucks here and there from a dead hardware platform is not going to meaningfully change my life. I verified I’m appropriately attributed in the game’s credits, and at this point I’m just glad people are enjoying (and extending!) my creation. Some people won’t feel the same way, and that’s okay. It’s important to consider how your code will be licensed should you ever find yourself in my scenario.
As a fun aside, here are some videos about the physical release of the game.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!