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PICO-8

A fantasy console for making, playing and sharing cute 32k cartridges. · By lexaloffle

Am I allowed to sell the games I make using this? or is this purely a creative social system?

A topic by Poxy created Apr 03, 2022 Views: 3,224 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 7

I'm a guy with a lot of ideas, and I want to someday make a living off of them, I have no problem if this is purely for sharing creative content but I'm looking to learn the works of something that I can make into my own product.

Deleted 1 year ago

Thanks for the help!

(+17)

That person is actually wrong about that. Games in splore are put there manually by their creators. You can export your pico 8 game in a binary format that both does not require pico-8 to play and doesn't show the source code. 

(1 edit) (+10)

As far as I know SPLORE only shows you games that have been uploaded to the BBS. So it would be possible to create a game, make a execuatable, sell it, and never have it available on SPLORE. @Poxy

(1 edit) (+4)

Yes, the games (tools / demos / carts / etc) that you make are your creation, that you can release with a license of your choosing. This includes program export or HTML exports that include the runtime engine part of pico-8.

See: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=faq + the license document that comes with pico-8.

Also this video that talks about more aspects of selling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKU2WWwhpQc

You might be able to, but frankly I doubt it.

For PICO8, your tools for publishing games are heavily limited. Technichally, You can with the export command in the pico8 console, but there isn't really a market for commercial PICO8 games, because there are already so many available for free and open source on the BBS forum and here on itch.

(+1)

"Files generated by exporting a cartridge with PICO-8 (Javascript, HTML, executeables and data files) may be used for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter them and redistribute them freely, provided that permission to do so is also granted by the authors of the cartridge." - the pico 8 licence.txt

this means you may distribute your CARTRIDGES but not the SOFTWARE itself.

Is there not a way to keep carts off of splore mode?

TL;DR

  • exported pico-8 carts are standalone applications
  • publishing to splore is manual/opt-in, and never default or automatic

As aloeheart pointed out:

That person is actually wrong about that. Games in splore are put there manually by their creators. You can export your pico 8 game in a binary format that both does not require pico-8 to play and doesn’t show the source code.

That is to say, all carts you make can be exported to run standalone.

They’re also kept off of splore, unless you explicitly and deliberately publish them on the BBS.