By submitting to the contest and especially winning money, you made a contract with the contest organizers. In this case one part of that is agreeing to allow

By submitting to the contest and especially winning money, you made a contract with the contest organizers. In this case one part of that is agreeing to allow the organizers to publish and distribute your copyrighted work. > my games were public, free, and accessible for judging during the entire competition period. But the rules didn't say anything about this being limited to only the competition period. > Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website, while you are free to keep working on it (and eventually charge for it/make commercial usage). It seems that under US copyright law, the license is by default irrevocable if the contract terms did not specify any conditions for revocation. So in this case unilateral revocation of the license is not possible. I can also see courts taking the words kept online to imply long term or perpetual distribution. Anyways if you look at the situation logically, this sort of contest almost always has all the past submissions and contest results as a resource for future contestants as well as something to browse interested people. If all that's left after the contest is over is the ranking of the winners, then I think that would be quite sad. > they threatened to retroactively disqualify my games (which they did) and demanded reimbursement of the prize money I had won in 2023, claiming my games were no longer “available online.” In fact this feels to be almost opposite of a threat, but actually a courtesy. The contest organizers are offering to basically undo the contract (basically erasing the contest submission) without any penalty, something they aren't obligated to do at all. They could just as easily just say "pound sand" and keep hosting the rom forever.