April 2002
You'll have to pay. Oh wait, no you won't
Well, I made an April Fool's
joke on the Surreal News forums about starting a subscription service like
Salon.com or IGN and including my levels as part of the subscription package,
effectively making it so that people would have to pay for my levels.
It seems it was a rather well-timed joke, too, because many sites really
were in the process of starting up a subscription system. Gamespot,
for example, has just recently done this, restricting most of its reviews
and screenshots to subscribers only. (Why is it that most of these
subscription "services" feel more like a loss of content rather than a
potential gain? I mean, they're just putting locks on old stuff,
not creating new subscriber-only content! I suppose Salon.com is
only making Premium its articles that were written after the subscription
system was created, and it's making them ad-free, so calling it a service
isn't as much of a misnomer for them, but Gamespot putting the "Subscribers
Only" label on archives which were previously available to everyone is
not a "service" in any sense of the word.) But even though sites
turning to subscription for revenue is the hot thing to do these days,
I'm not really going to do it. It's not practical, and I don't like
it when other sites start charging for content so I'm not about to turn
around and do it myself. Also, I don't think it would be legal to
distribute my levels for money even if I did wrap it up as part of a "Premium
Insider Complete Package" or some such thing, so even if I wanted to start
charging, I don't think I legally could. So, don't worry, all the
stuff on this site will remain free, as usual.