Just thinking out loud, here.

GholaMaster and myself have created maps that could, conceivably, be played on GT. As an alternative/additional source of funding, what if player-designed maps were available/playable for a small donation? Say, $5 or so? And then they wouldn't be fundable after that - so, say, you'd start with $1m in game funds and it would create a level playing field for all participants. This would create additional funds for Johnny to continue to develop and improve the game and it would keep player-designed maps somewhat separate from the rest of the game.

Thoughts?

Great idea.

Do you mean $5 for a user to create a world using his/her own map, or do you mean that each user would have to pay $5 to play it?

I think the latter would lead to very few players in the worlds, but the former sounds like it may work. I suppose my one worry is that there just aren't enough users to fill the worlds. (Even now, Kota barely had enough to make it play well.) Perhaps limiting user maps to 1024x512 might help.

Another idea I had in relation to user maps was to create a section of the site where users (including myself) upload their maps. Everyone else would then vote on them and I could choose the most popular maps for the upcoming worlds.

Woa, that would be awesome.