These are the questions I ask myself when I think about a recent occurrence. I contacted a developer I found on the Internet regarding the games at their website. I explained that I was looking for links to games, and I let them know that they could submit to my website. I also told them that I would appreciate it if they were to link to me on their website, but it wasn't necessary to do so.
Well, they submitted their games, and they also responded to my email. They told me that they would link to my site, but I would have to pay them to do it. It really didn't bother me that those were their requirements. They didn't want to link to my site, but they would capitalize on the situation and do it if I were to pay for the link. Obviously, I'm not going to pay for the link, but it did make me think about some things.
Currently, I will be spending a couple hundred dollars a year and countless hours of my time maintaining Playpile. I would hope that the site would be useful to some people, but I'm not sure if that could be possible if fellow developers do not support the philosophies behind creating the site. Developers are the lifeblood of the website, and if they don't support it then it will just die. No links to the site, and no submissions means it won't go anywhere.
The Internet has come along way since the 90s, I’m not qualified to compare about before then. Back then if I wanted to find some information I would log on and spend a good 30 minutes on the search engine trying to find the page I wanted listed. After that I’d quickly grab the information I needed and log off, it did cost almost £3 an hour so you didn’t want to waste any time. Back then a link was a lot more valuable and people realised this and always reciprocated, you link to me and I’ll link to you and we both win.
Now the Internet is a seething mass of similar pages, portals, blogs and that a link probably means so much less now. They probably don’t care if you link to them and they can probably not be bothered linking to you. However they are almost certainly getting the better deal, which are you more likely to stumble upon searching for, a small one game website or a portal used by hopefully a factor of 100 or more people, so I don’t know how they think you should pay them.