Nintendo grabs money, control from fans promoting its games on Youtube
penny-arcade.com
penny-arcade.com
Some people view Let's Plays before buying a game. People aren't going to go to the trouble of recording Let's Plays without getting any kind of ad revenue from it. So people aren't going to bother recording Nintendo games anymore.
And they can just delete all the Nintendo videos they already have up. So now Nintendo doesn't have anyone promoting their games (for free to Nintendo) and isn't getting any of the very small amounts of ad revenue and is competing against a bunch of other games that do have Let's Plays up online.
Definitely not nice, but stupid? I'm not sure about that. I have some doubts that Nintendo (being usually very good at not making their community angry IIRC) would do this without reason. Can we rule out that they actually noticed declining sales of some titles as Let's Play videos about them popped up?
I can't imagine they wanted a PA article on this though.
Let's run with that reasoning for a minute. That means that they did a study and found not only that the Let's Plays were costing them sales, but also that the lost revenue was small enough that it would be more profitable to keep the videos up and intercept the ad revenue, than to have them taken down entirely.
What that means is that the effect size they observed must have been tiny. As a consequence, to have observed a statistically significant correlation, they would have needed an extremely large sample size. Keep in mind that these are some very noisy variables they are supposed to have measured.
So in conclusion, yes I think we can rule that possibility out. Or at least, if they did notice declining sales, they were irrational for thinking that was sufficient evidence to take this action.
Maybe someone thought it'll make folks take their LPs down themselves without making much of a fuzz? But I admit it's not a very likely scenario.
Don't judge an industry by it's rotting old guard. Nintendo has been making blunder after blunder for quite some time and does not represent gaming as a whole.
Reddit has helped built a list[1] of studios and publishers who have given permissions for LPers to make videos, and the list is pretty comprehensive. Tons of developers and companies are 100% okay with and even promote it.
Also, with both next gen consoles supporting game play video natively, it's going to get bigger and bigger in the industry.
http://letsplaylist.wikia.com/wiki/%22Let%27s_Play%22-friend...
I haven't played many games since the early 2000s and I feel a bit like an old geezer stuck in the mentality of "back in my day..."
I've seen the chilling effects of this sort of thing before, in the Machinima world, and you'd be amazed how much damage removing or limiting the top creators in the chain can do.
Yeah, there are artists who don't clear samples, but those records are released as white label (for fear of legal action), or, they remix the samples such they they are unrecognizable (by mechanical means).
This is just the sampling argument all over again. I don't see why it should be different. The real question here is how good is the content ID algorithm? Is it going to get triggered on seconds of unedited video footage? Audio? What if you are talking over it or overlay text on it?
If you can create something new & unique to beat the algo, that's awesome. If you are simply using Nintendo's IP in metadata or wholesale showing off the game unedited, to draw people to your videos, your content should get questioned (ala Vanilla Ice using Bowie's riff in Ice Ice Baby).
Take, for example, Gamecenter CX vs a long play where someone just records himself playing a game and barely adds any commentary over it.
Maybe the reasoning is that this is not very beneficial to Nintendo, since most of their games are visually at most a "Meh".
I can't tell you how many times my son has come to me and asked for a new game because of some YouTube videos that he has been watching
Edit: as a matter of fact, he wanted to play the WiiU not too long ago after watching NintendoLand playthroughs of the Zelda game. The WiiU that hasn't been turned on in MONTHS
Taking control of content which they only have partial legal right to is still very much illegal and copyright infringement. They are basically knowingly committing commercial piracy, including sending knowingly false take down notices (if they claim complete ownership). In times like that, the authors of said videos has a good chance to sue for damages.
I don't think that asserting ownership within YouTube is equivalent to asserting legal ownership of all of the IP involved. For example, I can't see them rebroadcasting any of these videos in another medium.
And so we can clearly see Nintendo has lost its way and Minecraft is the the new Nintendo.
On the other side, no one will let you share their content.
If the world were a person, he would be right on track for schizophrenia.
Song mashups already go from songs to similar-sounding songs and those are fine. Again, IANAL, but if mashups are okay, it makes sense to me that Let's Play videos should fall under the same - if not more generous - rules.
The videos in question are people showing what can be done with something which is copyrighted. They videos don't provide any ability to play the game. The games are only being played by a single person. There is no copy of the game being made.
A running commentary of a single played instance of a game is entirely different than sitting down with a controller in your hand and playing the game. That seems significantly transformative to me.
And that's a huge problem with copyright law, it's so grey in so many areas. If the exact situation hasn't been defended in court, it's unclear whether or nothing something is legal.
What if it isn't a RPG? What if we're talking about a video of mario kart?
If I bought a physical Nintendo chess set, I don't think anyone would claim a video of my gameplay would be Nintendo's property. By extension, a video of me playing a virtual nintendo chess game with my commentary should still be mine, after all, the story is being written by the players. I think that's fairly analogous to a commentary of a mario kart game.
Now it gets interesting with a role playing game like zelda perhaps. I certainly have a right to produce a gameplay from it. Do I have a right to record it? Why not? How is it really any different that recording a play with a physical object, something which is done every day. Nintendo may have the storyline, but they didn't create the actual play. That is a result of an authorized use of the game. Player runs over here, picks up a sword -- that's something the player did, not Nintendo.
I think in the end it boils down to what the lawyers can convince a judge is true, rather than what can be proven or what is the law.
You could argue that videogames are somehow different. But they're not. If someone makes a video about having fun with their friends, then the game they're doing it in is almost incidental. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5J5LEBVCk
Videos such as that one take a lot of work to make. It takes many hours to record the content, many hours to edit it, and a way to promote it once it's made. The game maker probably doesn't deserve any slice of revenue generated from that. The game is incidental.
The other thing I would like to know if anyone has more info, is if this in fact, affects Let's Plays. Maybe they were only going after machinima, or videos that show trailers or cutscenes. Is there any source where I can read more of that? I think this could be the crux of the issue: if they aren't trying to get money from Let's Plays, the move isn't so bad. EDIT: NVM, read the original source and they are claiming LP videos... that's sad, really.
What I find weird about this whole thing is that neither Nintendo or YouTube have issued an explanation of how things are going to work, and why they think the move is a good one. With all the backslash that this has created in the last week, I would think those companies would like to offer their side of the argument.
As far as I know when you use any recorded human product (voice, movement, etc.) you need a signed "release form" from the people involved in that - else you stand to be sued for damages (due to rights violation, nothing to do with copyright, although I guess the LPers could have a case there as well). Music artists, for example, need to sign one of these release forms to give their publisher the rights to their voice.
Considering that the LPs are 50/50 Nintendo/LPer couldn't the LPer's [in theory] lash back and demand royalties because Nintendo illegally become their publisher without acquiring release forms (the YouTube EULA is between the LPer and YT, not the LPer and Nintendo)? Or indeed demand damages that far exceed any form of profit they have lost from the adverts in the first place (rights violation)? Or am I completely wrong?
In other words, they aren't even going to make very much money off of this in the short term, and they're driving the free advertising to their competition.
Someone posted this link here the other day. It's a good game. Nintendo could easily sell this on various platforms and app-stores.