When Exercising Copyrights Puts a Gamedev Under Threat (My Take on GBCOMPO 25)
I want to share a recent experience that shows how, even in “open” and passionate communities, exercising your copyright can meet with abusive practices. This is the story of a Game Boy developer (myself) who faced threats—some already applied—for making a simple request. I asked for my games to be removed from the website of a game jam organizer (the games were uploaded by the site owner, not by me).
I participated in two Game Boy jams: GBCOMPO 23 and GBCOMPO 25. I finished on the podium in 2023 but did not place in 2025. The rules clearly stated that submissions had to be freely available to both the public and the judges, that they would be published on the competition platform (itch), and that after the competition, developers were free to continue working on their games or commercialize them. I fully complied with these rules: my games were public, free, and accessible for judging during the entire competition period.
A few days ago, I requested the removal of all my games from this third-party homebrew site that hosts entries from these jams. The organizers’ response was surprising: they threatened to retroactively disqualify my games (which they did) and demanded reimbursement of the prize money I had won in 2023, claiming my games were no longer “available online.”
The competition rules do not mention any obligation to keep games online indefinitely, any perpetual right for the organizers to host them, or that removing a game from a third-party platform would be a violation. In reality, the games were online for the entire required period and even well beyond.
According to the site’s disclaimer and copyright law, “if you are the developer of something published here, you can, for any reason, request the removal of your work.” I was simply exercising my legal and moral rights over my creations. Nothing in the competition rules required me to keep my games online forever.
Yet the reaction from the organizers of GBCOMPO 23 and 25 was disproportionate: all traces of my participation were erased, and they are demanding that I refund the money I earned by placing on the podium in one of their jams. Worse, this jeopardizes my career as a gamedev, since many of the major Game Boy publishers are also the biggest financial partners of these organizers.
The organizers insist that the rules are clear and non-negotiable. However, what they interpret as a perpetual obligation does not exist in the official text. All these sanctions are based on a rule they retroactively invented.
This experience highlights the importance of knowing and defending your copyright, carefully reading competition rules, and being prepared to challenge arbitrary interpretations. Even in open-source or homebrew communities, creators can face excessive or retroactive demands. The key is not to let oneself be walked over.
I am sharing this story so that other creators understand their rights, so that communities and organizers realize the need to publish clear and fair rules, and to emphasize respect for original creation. Exercising your copyright is not a hostile act—it is a legitimate protection of your work. While this story may not interest the major players in the scene, it can resonate with gamedevs like myself everywhere.
I chose to post this message in the devlog of this game because, with everything happening, I genuinely don’t know what the future holds—for this project or for my journey as a gamedev. Being an indie developer is already incredibly hard, but standing up against giants is even harder. Yet transparency matters, and creators deserve to speak openly about what happens behind the scenes.
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Zoryad
A New Metroidvania for The GameBoy
| Status | In development |
| Author | allalonegamez |
| Genre | Platformer, Action, Adventure |
| Tags | Action-Adventure, analogue-pocket, game-boy, Game Boy, Game Boy ROM, gbstudio, Metroidvania |
More posts
- My Metroidvania Is Getting a Physical Boxed Edition (Pre-Order Information)51 days ago
- All the changes added since the jam version51 days ago
- The Game Map91 days ago
Comments
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The competition rules do not mention any obligation to keep games online indefinitely, any perpetual right for the organizers to host them, or that removing a game from a third-party platform would be a violation."
They don't have to - that's common sense. In Poland we even have a saying for that: "kto daje i odbiera, ten się w piekle poniewiera" = "one who gives and then takes back is surely rotting in hell"...
It was my idea that put demanding the return of prize money on the table. (I did not directly suggest doing it, for various reasons; but I did entertain the idea.) It was also my idea to disqualify the works retroactively. To be clear, I am not an organizer of gbcompo23 or gbcompo25, nor am I involved in any of the teams, nor am I a moderator of the gbdev Discord, or anything like that. I was consulted purely on the basis of providing a personal opinion. The full conversation which led to this is available on the gbdev Discord in the #homebrew-hub channel.
I believe it is unfair to benefit - especially financially - from a community effort, then turn your back on said community. It is your right, you are correct in saying so, but it is also a bridge that you are burning and you must be aware of that. I made the suggestions mentioned above in this light, after consulting some other people to get a reality check myself.
The administrator of the website in question, Homebrew Hub, is Antonio Vivace. He also operates the gbdev Discord and organizes gbcompo. There was no solution in which taking a combative stance, even if justified by law, would lead to “major Game Boy publishers” not finding out - because these people all talk to each other, because all of these projects are highly interconnected.
The rules state, quote, “Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website”. You are correct that there is no specific time period listed. However, at no point was it stated to be specifically Itch, either. The website which hosts the rules is gbdev.io, not itch.io. The rules say published, but they don’t specify by who. An interpretation which sidesteps linking to authors’ Itch pages completely is, therefore, potentially just as acceptable. I don’t know - I ultimately recommended Vivace to get a real lawyer before doing anything extreme, but it would probably be much more expensive than it is worth.
It is really unfortunate that they were written so imprecisely, but I suppose the organizers felt it was unnecessary to be pedantic, given that the communities Game Boy homebrew owes its heritage to (in particular the demoscene) see this kind of redistribution of competition works as a kind of common law. I am pretty sure this will be amended for future events.
For whatever it’s worth, I recommended removing the works irrelevant to gbcompo immediately, as my problem was specifically with what I saw as a break of its social contract.
EDIT: After getting a broader sampling of feedback online, I agree that suggesting an escalation all the way up to “return our prize money” was a mistake on my behalf. Even if I pointed out that it was a nuclear option with massive asterisks and did not recommend in the end, I should have pushed back on taking it that far, as maybe some of this could have been avoided.
I’m flummoxed by this mentality. If Antonio and the team took your recommendation seriously and are trying to enforce it, then both you and the gbdev team don’t actually know what community means.
This stance is harmful to devs, and does not benefit the community or the developers. When I helped organize GB Compo 23, there was no discussion amongst us regarding requiring the ROM to be hosted indefinitely on compo’s website, nor repercussions for redaction.
Shameful.
I’m surprised by this, given that entries for GB Compo 21 have been hosted indefinitely on GitHub since, well, 2021: https://github.com/gbdev/gbcompo21 - the same goes for the 2023 and 2025 iteration. Were you not aware of this?
The same applies to adjacent homebrew competitions: the yearly NESdev competition requires all ranked and judged entries to consent to being included as part of a freely distributed multicart, whereas the N64brew jam has a similar policy of mirroring compo releases on their GitHub.
This also goes outside of homebrew competitions and into demoscene. For example, the largest demoscene party, Revision, states in their rules that all entries presented will be mirrored on scene.org. Another large party, Evoke, explicitly requires contestants to accept that their works will be freely distributed online.
This also goes beyond the West. The Japanese WonderWitch Grand Prix, a hobbyist console game competition that ran from 2001 to 2003, also stipulated consent for free distribution.
I believe that access to games which were the result of a competition co-funded by the community helps the community as a whole grow. The social contract has two sides, not just one, and I think the non-developer side can feel rightly betrayed in this situation.
I’ve reached out to Antonio with my thoughts. This mentality is partly why I left the competition.
What exactly does the host of this event lose by de-listing the game? What goodwill are they burning with developers by taking such a harsh stance? I'm seeing a lot of fellow developers upset by this decision and reconsidering participating in the future compos.
Ok, so you've listed some ethical precedents. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of creators who are willing to license their products as shareware, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to. From an archivist perspective, I would much rather there be accurate records kept that acknowledge all entries, even if those entries aren't available to play anymore. I'm literally writing a book about homebrew games made during the early days of the internet, so I know how frustrating it can be for games to disappear to history.
But at the end of the day, it's about a creator wanting to protect their copyright in order to sell it. If the compo truly acknowledges that creators could want to turn their entries into commercial products, then they shouldn't stand in the way when creators want to.
Speaking of social contracts, I just think that non-developers shouldn't have such a demand on the free labor of creators. If they want access to a game, they should pay for it.
I listed precedents in the form of other major competitions which impose similar, or even harsher, requirements on their participants, to explain that this is not an unusual policy for a game jam, especially one with prizes/rewards at play. Yes, everyone who submits their work to these competitions - the NESdev compo, for example - has to either allow distributing their work in this manner, or not submit their work to that specific competition. My stance is specifically that it is not uncommon or unreasonable for an event, especially in the social circles GB/GBC homebrew was born out of, to impose such expectations!
At the end of the day, many freely available GB/GBC games have already been turned into commercial products. You can do this by releasing an expanded version of the game (which has precedent), by putting the same game on a physical cartridge, or even by paywalling ROM downloads but not the web emulator (which another gbcompo entry has done). Even allalonegamez’s own 2025 entry, Zorvad, which is still available on Itch, has had a commercial release announced while still being playable online. The competition has not interfered with any of those - it only stepped in when a game which was entered in the competition was threatened with the possibility of it not being available online at all.
“Speaking of social contracts, I just think that developers shouldn’t have such a demand on the free labor of organizers and judges. If they want their game critiqued and promoted, they should pay for it.” /hj
Asking for the prize money back is out of line since there are no violation guidelines/penalties listed in the rules. But the rule in question is pretty clear:
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).
Nothing about it being only through the duration of the competition. And they host many more games besides compo games so the removal policy applies to those, but compo games are subject to the posted rules of keeping them available on the competition website.
This is a part of the convo I had with the organizers:
This is me speaking :
"Regarding the competition rules
The competition required submissions to be available for free on http://itch.io.
This condition was fully met.
My entry was publicly accessible on itch io during the event, throughout the judging period, and even long after.
The rules do not specify:
* any obligation to keep the game available indefinitely,
* any requirement for permanent hosting on http://itch.io,
* any transfer of rights allowing you to enforce perpetual availability.
If the intention had been to require permanent publication, this would have needed to be stated explicitly — which it is not.
The “future” mentioned in the rule was respected: the game remained online well beyond the competition period. The rule does not define any duration — 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, or forever.
"
There is no rule that states repercussions for withdrawal of a submission and returning of prize money. That is egregious. Do not return any money. You have my support.
I have to note, I was an organizer and judge for Compo ‘23 but withdrew from them after some disagreements and dissatisfaction with how the compo was held. I had no part in this decision, but had I been part of it still, I would have fought tooth and nail against it.
Thank you, I will need it. For now, I am only met with ignorance toward my message or outright censorship.
Sad to see something like this in the Game Boy community. Some great games have come out of jams like this but the organizers need to realize that it's about the developers not themselves.
The entitlement they seem to have here over hosting your game from the jam along with retaliation for exercising your right of ownership is unacceptable.
Thank you for your message.
"No only available online" my ass; it's clearly still on this very website! What was the GBC thinking?
This is probably in regards to a submission from gbcompo23
Oh, that explains it!