Forum - View topicNEWS: Nintendo Claiming Ad Revenue for YouTube Game Videos
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Keonyn
 Subscriber Posts: 5567 Location: Coon Rapids, MN |
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I'm sorry that I don't accept the "you're wrong because I said so, even though I can't prove you're wrong anymore than you can prove I'm right" argument. It's one thing to argue the potential legalities here which, when all is said and done Nintendo is in the right from a legal standpoint, as much as I or others wish to disagree with their actions. It's another point to then sit there and try and claim that the videos don't even hold any of their perceived value, or try to claim that videos that essentially show off games and generat millions of views don't have any potential sales impact. Sorry, but you can't just say "it's not true because you haven't done market research" when the accusor hasn't either. It's not "mudslinging" to point out the fallacy of that line of argument. |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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The problem for all of you hiding behind the faux par shield of entitlement is that all and any of those "counter arguments" would have a snow ball's change in hell of standing up in the courts of law. Life's not fair, get use to it. Nintendo is doing you a favour, but you're all too blind with self righteous, selfish entitlement to see it, and also too stubborn, or lazy to actually read the T & C that comes with every single game. But do keep railing that "it's not fair" fanboy bollox. It is good comedy.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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But this is specifically about Nintendo, and - hang on, I can't believe I'm about to say this, the universe may implode - TitanXL is right. If you think for a second that a Let's Play video has somehow, in some significant way, helped sales of Mario, Zelda or Pokemon games, you've bought so hard into the "FANS RULE, GAMERS = THE BEST" self-serving internet narrative that nothing will convince you otherwise. This is like saying a really popular internet critic's mug-into-camera YouTube review of Iron Man 3 in any significant way helped that movie's record-breaking box office run. At some point you have to get over yourself and stop seeing THE FANS as this monolithic all-powerful make-or-break thing, particularly in the case of unstoppable evergreen franchises that outsell everything else Nintendo has ever made. Mario, Zelda and Pokemon are the milk and bread of video games and do not need any fan assistance to sell. |
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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^ sure, but exactly how does it improve the state of things for Nintendo to take the money?
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Animehermit
 Posts: 964 Location: The Argama |
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But do you really think them doing this is going to help them? That this is somehow going to make them money when everyone stops doing LPs of their games?
It may not have improved their sales that much, but I don't see how this is going to do anything but hurt them. This is not even touching how this could possibly hurt review and first impressions content. Where often times videos are anywhere from 25-45 minutes of gameplay over the reviewers thoughts. YouTube can't tell the difference between review content and LPs. Also Zac I'm getting this undercurrent of "I don't approve of LPers and the way they make money so good on Nintendo for shutting these morons down"? |
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LUNI_TUNZ
 Posts: 809 |
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Incidentally, I made this exact same point somewhere else, and got the same response. But doesn't saying "you can't prove it doesn't increase sales" defeat the entire argument that it does increase sales, and it's valued marketing? For every 5 people who don't buy that new Mario game because YoutubeLetsPlayerXY didn't play it, will be the millions more who buy it, but it's the new Mario game.
No it's not. It's completely anecdotal, instead of answering Titan's question he listed off some non-indie games he himself bought, to use as proof against Titan's point. One person does not account for "huge" sales. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10420 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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For starters, transformative actually isn't one of the fair uses explicitly mentioned by US fair use law. So transformative is not a very good legal defence. It regularly fails to protect people in court (Shepard Fairey for example). As I said, on it's own, being transformative is not a good defence at all. But if your work falls under one of the other covered defences (news reporting, criticism, etc...) then being transformative can be beneficial, but it some cases it can actually hurt the defense (because you have now infringed not only on the copyright, but also on the author's rights). Nothing is simple in copyright. Interestingly enough, parody also isn't explicitly covered in US fair use law (afaik), but many courts have found that parody (which is a type of transformative work) might be covered by fair use. Satire on the other hand is much less often recognized as fair use. I actually wish transformative had more protection under the law. I think transformative art is a very important part of our culture. As for playing a video game... that's not transformative. You are creating a video of you using their product in the exact way they product was created. You aren't transforming anything, you most certainly are not creating "an independant and new piece of art." Red vs. Blue and other machinima works are significantly more transformative. Yet even these works have run into legal problems. The creators of RvB were worried Microsoft might bar them from distributing their work, but Microsoft was insightful enough to give them permission to continue. Finally, let me remind everyone that "fair use" is not safe harbor. Even if something is fair use, it is still copyright infringement and you can still be taken to court. It is only once you are in court that you can bring up fair use as a legal defence... Last edited by Tempest on Tue May 21, 2013 4:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Animehermit
Posts: 964 Location: The Argama |
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He also made the same exact point you made earlier in your post. |
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DavidShallcross
 Posts: 1008 |
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No, not inherently so. But "There goes X, grasping at the Y argument" and "Thanks for playing as usual X" don't lead the discussion in a good direction. |
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Keonyn
Subscriber Posts: 5567 Location: Coon Rapids, MN |
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Yeah, and I'm the mudslinger... Sorry. It's one thing to say Nintendo has a legal leg to stand on and is within the right as far as the law is concerned. Nobody is saying they aren't, but that doesn't mean they can't disagree with the action taken; particularly when the competitors are generally not taking that action and are actually encouraging what Nintendo is pushing against. That is the nice thing about a free market, it doesn't just allow the companies to call the shots and companies and consumers are mutually dependent. Nintendo can do something foolish, and consumers can feel inclined to support companies that cater more effectively to the gamers whom they depend on. There's a lot of game companies out there, and I have no problem shifting my money towards those that work with the community, rather than try to capitalize off it and control it. Plus, your claims that they're doing us favors and that people are self-righteous for not accepting the benevolence of their amazingly generous act just stinks of everything you accuse others of. Not to mention sitting there insulting people simply for disagreeing with Nintendo's actions, which they have every right to do as people are perfectly within their rights to form opinions. Talk about being self-righteous, considering that's exactly what your comment is. Sorry, but some people making videos of them playing games for entertainment not wanting a company sweeping in and spamming their vids with ads and controlling all the content isn't just being selfish, particularly when said company is already making millions off these items as-is. Who's really the side being selfish here? Even if the makers of these vids were being selfish, that cuts both ways, and Nintendo is equally or more so.
Or you've bought in to the counter concept that nothing will convince you otherwise. Once again, assertions without evidence. We can both make stuff up and go on forever if you like. The whole point was that Titan simply said it's wrong while he can't prove the claim it's wrong any more than the other guy can demonstrate it's right. Besides, it can certainly help sales. I often look through YouTube videos of games I'm looking in to, including LP's, to get a feel for a game to see if I really want to buy it or not. I'm not even the only person that does this by any stretch, which I can say with absolute certainty considering the time I spend in gaming circles. Even big market major franchises aren't immune because if one game was great that is no guarantee the rest will be. Nintendo probably doesn't need LPs or similar content to sell those franchises, but it may help with smaller franchises or stand-alone titles. It's not that hard to imagine that these videos with thousands to millions of views showing off content might just help sell that product. It certainly isn't going to hurt. Also, for the Iron Man 3 thing, once again; apples and oranges. Not even comparable so not worth addressing.
Considering that was kind of the point, yeah. Titan's question wasn't a question but basically saying that because he doesn't have copies of sales figures to toss out then his opinion is void, even though Titan presented no such figures of his own to demonstrate that he was wrong either. My evidence may be anecdotal, but it's still more than Titan managed to present. In the end, barring one of us funding some major market research, nobody is going to present the required "evidence" to prove that one way or the other, it'll just be a matter of who chooses to believe what. |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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Yeah, boy, it isn't like you can't look at decades of sales numbers for Mario titles, look at the years when LP videos have become popular and see that the numbers are all completely steady. Gosh there's just no way to know if LP videos contribute significantly to a series that sells 7+ million units every single time it's been released since the 1980s!
Professional critics who produce video reviews using copies provided by Nintendo that respect their embargoes do not have anything to worry about here, period. Suggesting otherwise is silly.
You're reading that into it because I'm not blindly on the side of LPers, but that isn't at all how I feel. LPers had/still have a good thing going. LP videos can be fun and I watch them myself from time to time; good for them. But it's an incredibly shaky thing to try and build revenue on, one that isn't particularly legal, and one where at any point the company that owns the game you're streaming can come in and be perfectly within their rights to tell you to stop. Once you step into the "I'm making a decent living on this" territory, good for you, but when they come knocking I'm not sure why you'd complain. It's like building a treehouse on land you don't own and then when the guy who owns the land comes around, after years of letting you use the land for free, asks for a little rent you pitch a fit and rip the treehouse down. Couldn't you just enjoy what you had and recognize it for what it was? You knew full well it wasn't a great idea to build your treehouse there. My issue is primarily with the folks who honestly think this is evil or wrong of Nintendo and that LP videos are some amazing transformative work of art that deserves protecting. Once you start romanticizing what they actually are, saying they're somehow more than just an (hopefully) informative and/or funny guy showing you all of the content in a videogame, that's when your arguments become absurd and it's easy to see why you'd twist yourself into knots angrily denouncing Nintendo for simply putting a stop to the profiteering, in spite of the fact that you can still make all the Let's Plays you like of whatever Nintendo game exists. |
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Mohawk52
Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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doctordoom85
 Posts: 2092 |
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You know what, my irritation with Nintendo has just plummeted a lot, purely because what Microsoft just pulled today makes Nintendo (and to even a larger extent, Sony) look like SAINTS in comparison.
"Hey kids, do you enjoy taking your game over to a friend's house so that you can have fun playing it together? I mean, there was kinda this franchise that practically defined our first console that lots of people loved playing together with their friends. Well guess what? Now we think it's in everyone's best interest if we charge you a fee if you want to play your game at a friend's house. Or you can enjoy the fun experience of dragging all the hardware over to said friend's house. Yup, we're thinking of you, the gamers!" But hey, at least what they're doing is legal, that automatically means everyone is forced to also find it morally acceptable, right? Well, by that "logic" it's also morally acceptable if I never buy an Xbox One and just stick to PS4 and Wii U. 
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Mesonoxian Eve
Posts: 1858 |
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The discussion of a video's copyright is pointless because the issue has nothing to do with copyright except for one: the video clearly is using a copyrighted works, not that the video is infringing copyrights.
For those who don't yet understand: Nintendo is looking at the visitors to these sites, and noticed quite a few of them are looking up how to exploit Metroid Prime. Rather than tell the video maker to cease and desist, they waltzed over to YouTube and said, "Yo! This video is using our game, and we want to throw an ad onto it and reap the revenue." The legality of the video is pointless with what Nintendo is doing here. And as a business, Nintendo is absolutely going to take advantage of marketing their own products by hitching a ride of videos using their (older) products. What's also important to realize here is that I've not seen any indication at all Nintendo has interfered with the current revenue stream other than adding another ad (primarily the video) to the page. Can anyone here confirm Nintendo is replacing ads? Because I can't find it. This tells me, in short, that not only will the LPer continue making money from the other ads, but that there's just one more that the revenue isn't going to them. It is, after all, an ad revenue sharing system. Even YouTube is getting a piece, yet I see no one complaining that YouTube's injecting ads and reaping the profits. To sit and criticize this gift horse is rather astounding to me. But hey, let them continue to complain to the point Nintendo gets pissed off and rather than share the revenue, tells them to remove the videos. Let's see how much these LPers make then. |
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Keonyn
Subscriber Posts: 5567 Location: Coon Rapids, MN |
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Nope, you kind of don't have to when they come right out and basically say as much, encourage it, and in some cases even provide fans the means to do it.
Never read Carl Marx, nice backhanded assumption though. Some companies work with their communities as they recognize free markets are a symbiotic system. It's not rocket science, and it works quite well for the likes of Valve and Riot and the like.
Belief isn't an issue, the remarks speak for themselves.
Most are doing so on their own accord. It's better that a company swooping in pretending to have some benevolent intent at heart while they stamp their ads all over your videos. Plus, you're again addressing the legality which people aren't even disputing, do you really have no other material valid to add? People aren't disagreeing with the legal course of action, but whether the action itself is truly right/wrong or just. |
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