Perhaps you could seize the opportunity to train yourself not to look for a commercial value, or indeed, any value beyond it's inherent value.
To me it's obvious that this has value in itself; and frankly, I'm surprised you don't appreciate that.
To me it's obvious that this has value in itself; and frankly, I'm surprised you don't appreciate that.
Cool! We're in agreement.
Here's my take: I think there always could be a possibility of making a product that (you could convince) people like enough to pay for. (Here in my country, people literally sell shit for money. Elk shit, to be exact. Apparently, many Germans want to have it in their homes.)
But let's say you come to this wonderful small gelateria in an Italian village. The ice cream is amazing. The setting is amazing. Your experience is breathtaking. Naturally, since we're all entrepreneurs here and all that jazz, you think "I wonder if there's not a commercial value in this". So you start making some kind of ice cream cones or whatever. You make advertising which creates a longing for that experience, that we all kind of know (perhaps even from my few faltering words) of Italian ice cream on a trattoria somewhere in Tuscany. You sell the ice cream to people.
Now, did you expose more people to that original gelateria? No, you didn't! You sold them on the idea, and they got some pretty boring ice cream to eat in their pretty boring home. And you got the money.
That's an approximation of what I'm afraid might happen if you succeeded in convincing the creator to "monetize". But it's ok, you won't do that; first off, he's not here and what's more he's obviously got enough talent to make whatever money he wants to, should he so decide.
Edit: In my original reply, I didn't mean "train". I rather meant "practice". It's a subtle but important difference and I see how it can shift the perception of my message quite a bit. Forgive me, I am not a native speaker.
Your gelateria analogy is flawed, because the gelateria is already a commercial enterprise, making gelato and selling it to customers.
A more apt analogy would be someone who - as a hobby - makes the best damn gelato on the planet...when he has the time.
I think what @eigenvalue was getting at was something like, "hey, I bet people would pay for your gelato, so you could turn this into something more than just a hobby."
Natural scenery doesn't cost money to make. Making profit off of it isn't intrinsically value-creating.
Software does take effort to make, and being comfortable finding ways to monetize it means more programmers can afford to create things like this. Not everyone has as enough free time to make all the things we want to pro bono. Many people have jobs (often for other people who did figure out how to monetize their own ideas).
So I'm all in favour of developers practicing asking/answering that question, because often finding the answer is what allows them to actually pursue those ideas. It's not wrong for people to sell the fruits of their labour—the world gets fruit that might not have existed otherwise.
Part of it was actually probably my not-quite-conscious perception of eigenvalue's ideas as pretty unimaginative and lacking in potential. What about an immersive world where everything is a fractal and where all players can build new things? Everything is an algorithm with a few parameters and it's made real when you observe it. Now that's a billion dollar idea which might even be an estimation of the workings of the real world. :-)
But, truthfully, it was mostly just a play on words and GPs username.
Despite this, we can still appreciate this as art in and of itself. That doesn't mean it cannot be monetized.
Because from at least one interpretation - 'value in itself' means that it is not valued because it has a use in the production of something else which is valuable, but valued for its own sake. And on this definition it doesn't rule out having commercial value at all, since having commercial value simply means that people will pay money for it. It doesn't mean that they have to put it towards some other use.
So if I say "this is valuable", then nobody can remove that value by saying "no it's not", that just means, "I don't see value in it".
But none of this has anything to do with what eigenvalue said. With the subjective, immediate way of reasoning I am proposing, the way of spotting commercial value is saying "I want to pay money for this", which I also understand as your standpoint. But that's not what eigenvalue was saying, or rather that's not how I read it. To me it felt more like "I think this could be smartly packaged in a way that would make some other people pay money to somebody else", which I don't particularly like. Hence my reaction.
But again, mostly the wordplay which I found irresistible. :)