Is PJ
I am more than happy to participate without getting reimbursed. The thought that I should somehow get compensated for offering my talents to benefit charity is absolutely ridiculous.
Quote from Graviton:
I think we are expecting a ballpark estimate of around 700 people this time around? Looking at the schedule, It looks like there is about 150 unique people between volunteers, staff, and runners. If all of them got a 50% discount, that would increase the fee for everyone else by around 10%. A 33% discount would bring that down to around a 7% increase. I don't think that would be too unreasonable... a $50 registration fee would become between like $53 and $56 for non participating registrants. Even if runners had a free pass, that $50 only becomes a bit over $60. I'm not saying that we should change anything right now, but this could be something to consider in the near future as the ratio of non-participants to participants increases.
This about it this way:
You submit a game. You don't get it. You don't get a discount.
Someone else submits a game. The runner gets in and gets a discount.
How would that make you or others feel? It's pretty much just a random guessing game as to whether you get a discount or not. Hardly a good incentive.
And then again - it's not fair. Where does it stop? If runners get a discount, what about organizers? What about moderators? What about people who help out? What about runners from previous years? What about well-known runners? Where do it end?
Not to mention all the administrative stuff. Everyone pays a different amount and you need to check who pays what and make sure that amount is paid.
While on the other hand, everyone pays the same, there are no ethical issues and less administrative burden.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, and besides that, who is going to pay for YOUR discount? Everyone else! That certainly isn't nice...
Quote from Graviton:
You have to keep in mind that as these things grow, the runners of the major games like Super Metroid (a game that by itself makes ludicrous amounts of money) have increasing amounts of leverage. Should the Super Metroid community decide to sit a marathon out, a golden opportunity for a guaranteed $100K+ was just lost. It seems kind of bad to think of runs as such a numbers game with money, but it has certainly become clear that games that the speedrunning community doesn't think too highly of are put on the schedule solely because of a potential to raise money... so I think this is worth mentioning. It would hardly be a bad idea to provide small perks to the runners involved (and the staff/volnuteers), because without them, there wouldn't be a single cent raised.
Do they really have leverage? Do you think that all Super Metroid runners all of a sudden refuse to go to the marathon just because they don't get paid? I think the chance is pretty slim.
And besides - if you do give in and pay the runner some, who is to say the runner/community won't demand more next time?
I'd like to think that the speedrunning community is pretty open. If some people refuse to run a game, someone else can just take up the torch. To the casual runner, a game being slower by maybe 1-2 minutes probably isn't a big deal, so even someone who does not have the absolute world record can still run a game. So that makes it so that if some people/community refuse to play it, someone else can pick up the torch, and if the issue is simply brought up "they won't run it because they don't get paid, but no one else is getting paid anyway," it would bring them a lot of shame, I'd think. The net is an awful place for news to spread. That could be a pretty good leverage that GDQ implicitly has. I would think a lot of people in the community would look bad upon such people and that would foster competition, so I really think this is a no-issue.
Quote from Graviton:
Very true, but keep in mind that a large portion of runners spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours of their free time perfecting their games to showcase at marathons. With the exception of a select few, these runners don't get paid at all for what they do. The level of skill and mastery of these games is the entire premise behind Games Done Quick, and without that these marathons would literally be a lets play event. It doesn't sound that crazy to me to acknowledge that commitment, even if the runners themselves understand that they don't expect anything in return other than personal satisfaction and possibly the entertainment of others with their hobby.
It is acknowledged by the fact that they have a chance to demonstrate their abilities in the marathon. They get shown on stream. They might even get a lot of publicity. Why does everything have to be about money?
Quote from Graviton:
People will always question, jokingly or not, whether certain runners have advantages compared to others when submitting runs ("oldboy privilege", etc.). Runners having discounts wouldn't change any of that, as there is already an obvious advantage in simply participating in the marathon at all when you wish to showcase your game.
Like kirby mentioned, it will just make even more sour and lead to some more heated discussions. That's not something that's very fun to deal with.
Quote from Graviton:
And to be fair, the notion of people submitting only for a discount is completely irrelevant because Mike would obviously still select the games based on what he thinks best fits the marathon. Even now, some people assuredly submit runs only to increase their exposure on twitch and become e-famous... which would far exceed the monetary value of saving a single registration fee anyway.
I don't think it's irrelevant. It would increase "dummy" submissions where people would only submit to try to get that discount. That will even more added work to an already busy schedule.
Why not just keep everything fair and simple?