Otherwise you might as well just say that you hate poor people
Every once in a while I get hit by the thought that maybe I should try and see if I can submit G.B. Rober to a games festival, so that it might get a bit of a wider reach. Also I found back when I was lucky enough to do this with other games of mine, that watching people play your game is a very good way to gain some very useful feedback, especially if you don't have the resources to pay testers. Obviously with Covid this is all not very possible, because none of us should probably attend any kind of event hosted in a stuffy, poorly ventilated exhibition hall, but there are still digital events around, and it would still be nice to inform more people that this game exists?
Covid aside, there are several other things that make exhibiting my games tough: First of all, there’s no good list of possible events where I could submit my stuff to, ever since that publicly maintained list from the promoter app dev got closed. The second thing is that a lot of games festivals do not like poor people.
Exhibiting games, especially in person is expensive, because you have travel costs and extra costs for promotional materials, which already makes it something that isn’t really possible for everyone. However, you could still try and plan around that, even with limited funds, when you’re aware of it ahead of time. I did this twice with Splinter Zone and it was rough, but I managed to do it. However, one thing that very often prohibits me from even submitting my game to a festival is the fact that a lot of them require you to pay a submission fee. Those fees, usually between 50-100$ are probably meant to stave off what might be considered spam, or “shovelware”, but they are also pretty good at preventing poor people from submitting their work.
I can plan around a trip a few months ahead of time, but when I’m faced with either spending $50 on the chance of maybe also having to plan for a trip, should my game get accepted, or not having to eat garbage for the second half of the month, I will always choose the latter. Submission fees are just at the right price point where it’s not worth the gamble for me. Especially considering that I would have to pay them for each festival I submit my game to, since I can’t guarantee that I’ll get accepted into any of them.
So what seems like a “reasonable” fee, to people that aren’t poor, is actually prohibitively expensive, both because of the added uncertainty and because of the large amount of festivals out there.
Some events try to get around this by providing financial hardship clauses, but those aren’t ideal either. To give a short glimpse into my life: Every six months I have to re-apply for welfare in Germany and each time I have to make a detailed statement about how much money I made and how high my rent and a bunch of other stuff is, just to proof that I am in fact actually too poor to live on my own and therefore qualify for financial assistance. On top of that, I also need to do that (or would need to do that) for a lot of other aspects of public life, because a lot of it is too expensive for me. Having to prove over and over again, that you actually are poor and don’t just want some freebies is demeaning, exhausting and always carries with it the implication that you might actually still be a cheater. It treats people that don’t have enough disposable income as second-rate human beings and potential frauds. So even though your financial hardship clause might help some folks with lower income to submit their work, it’s still more work that they have to do as opposed to someone who just has a spare $50 lying around.
Submission fees make even less sense, in times like this, where most events are digital, since stuff like event space and potential equipment costs aren’t really a factor. So if your event still has a submission fee (when it was already a trash concept in pre-covid times), you now basically show that you have open contempt for people with a low income. It expresses that you, as an event either think that poor people shouldn’t make games, or that they just don’t exist. I mean how could they exist, when they never submit their work to your event, right?
Which brings me to my last point: You might think that submission fees prevent people from submitting “lower-quality” work to your event (whatever the hell that means), but because you are also completely disregarding people with lower income, you also end up with games that are all coming from the same kind of people. Meaning people with money to spend. You want more people from marginalized backgrounds to get into videogames and exhibit their work? Waive the fucking submission fees. You want, cool, experimental alternative works? Waive the fucking submission fees.
You might have to look at some sketchy submissions as a result, but at least you don’t imply that you hate poor people.