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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

It's a stupid move by Nintendo.

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.

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This was such a solid analysis through-and-through. I feel that so many companies are getting real antsy and feel the need to grab for complete 100% ownership over all creative rights for everything with no leeway whatsoever. We, the people who actually pay for & consume these games, have no right to redesign or modify or record or promote anything without their consent - which would probably be denied most of the time anyways. From my point of view, it's just very difficult to continue supporting the video game industry anymore.

>From my point of view, it's just very difficult to continue supporting the video game industry anymore.

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...

Certainly a valid argument, and thanks for the link I will check it out.

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..."

People recorded Let's Plays as a hobby for years before a few worked out that it might be a business. This isn't going to stop anyone but the few who thought it would be a good idea to make their living playing video games for the Internet.

Who also happen to be the people putting the most time and effort into producing entertaining, watchable Let's Plays, and generally are the people who have the biggest audience.

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.

It's analogous to Girl Talk having to clear samples of other artists' work to produce his records.

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.

You talk like the whole world agreed that having to clear samples was a good thing for the music industry.

> Some people view Let's Plays before buying a game

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

> Some people view Let's Plays before buying a game.

Maybe the reasoning is that this is not very beneficial to Nintendo, since most of their games are visually at most a "Meh".

Really? I've always held that the common thought was that Nintendo games are very stylistic and artfully designed. I hear people talk for days about how beautiful the new Zelda game is or how artistically styled the new Mario game is. They might not pump out the most pixels, but they can designed around their limitations.

...but that's even more reason to view someone actually playing the game rather than just looking at screenshots.

> It's a stupid move by Nintendo.

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.

>Can we rule out that they actually noticed declining sales of some titles as Let's Play videos about them popped up?

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.

You're assuming studies were done as opposed to just some exec hearing about it in a meeting and going "We need to get a handle on this thing"?

My point was that the rational version of what fhd2 suggested is very unlikely, leaving only irrational possibilities. If Nintendo is doing this on an executive's whim, then that's pretty stupid, which was my point.

> 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.

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.

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