My unpopular opinion:
Even though there are some free and open-source alternatives like TIC-80, I still want PICO-8 to be free and open-source. The developers most certainly aren't by any means entitled to make money from PICO-8; The project will only make money if it has a profitable business model behind it. Building closed-source programs and selling them to customers is, obviously, a classic and tried and true way of making money from software development.
But even if PICO-8 was an open-source project, there would still be ways to monetize it, including:
- Donations and funding from external sponsors
- Some sort of non-free add-ons to PICO-8
- Official merch, maybe
- Official hardware to run PICO-8 games, maybe in a similar style to those Chinese retro handheld consoles
- Consulting (if it even makes sense to hire software consulting from fantasy console developers, lol)
- and more.
Obviously, none of these things are guaranteed to be profitable but could be a starting point if PICO-8 suddenly turned into open-source software.
Nevertheless, I'd probably still buy PICO-8 if had the cash to spare - the Dollar exchange rate is really high here in Brazil. Still wish it was open-source though.