Do you agree with Nintendo's Creators Program?

[gudenau]

I agree with this, I like how it is getting handled. If you do not care about the income then why bother, but if you need it then you can have it.

 

[Gahars]

The truth is, Nintendo is right on this issue. Which is astonishing, since they are usually wrong in everything lately.

Gameplay footage is still copyrighted material. Nintendo owns it, whether you like it or not. You never purchase the game itself, you are purchasing a licence to play it. In private. When you share the game in public, and you gain money from it, you are breaching the EULA. And the law...

It is not legal for Pewdiepie and company to make millions of ad revenue simply by playing a game other sweated to create. Sorry. It is not right either. It is not moral.

You may argue as much as you want that viewers like the people and not the games, but try to remove gameplay footage and see how many views they will have left...

All this revenue they make, should go to the devs of said games, in order for them to make better games in the future. Not some moron with plenty of free time and a camera.

I can't speak for the EULA, but in the USA we have something called Fair Use. It's supposed to protect people who use copyrighted material in certain contexts, like reviews (so you can show footage from a movie you're reviewing), education (so you can share something with a class), etc. Fair Use also protects "transformative works," where you use some already extant thing and turn it into something entirely new. Let's Plays are arguably covered under this classification; since gameplay is such an integral part of a video game, footage with commentary would be transformative enough to be protected.

That's the legal argument for it, anyway. There's certainly room for disagreement, neither side has taken this to court. What's important to note is that every publisher besides Nintendo has accepted it as valid and allow for this content to be made; many publishers even outright encourage it.

You say that developers should be paid for the hard work, and I certainly agree, which is why I support Let's Plays even if I don't care for them much myself. LP's can be powerful promotional tools, especially for smaller titles, and it's something that the developers/publisher don't even have to pay for. There are a plethora of games that would have languished in obscurity if some Youtube personality hadn't exposed them to an audience of millions (look at the explosion in popularity that Amnesia enjoyed after PewDiePie and others faffed about in it). Even big games can benefit from the boost.

By demanding a cut of the relatively paltry ad revenue and turn away huge sources of publicity and exposure, it seems that Nintendo can't see the forest for the trees, which is made all the worse by the fact that (as noted before) no other company has this problem.

It's also worth pointing out that this policy doesn't just inhibit Let's Plays. Even if we agreed that Let's Plays have absolutely no standing whatsoever, review content is completely, unambiguously legitimate and that's still hurt by this policy. They're subject to all the same terms and conditions, and giving Nintendo control over what's allowed to be posted, and who's allowed to be paid... it's a conflict of interest, to say the least.

Plus, we're on a website with a pretty healthy following of pirates. Let's not go throwing stones over what's "moral" in this sort of situation.

 

[TemplarGR]

I can't speak for the EULA, but in the USA we have something called Fair Use. It's supposed to protect people who use copyrighted material in certain contexts, like reviews (so you can show footage from a movie you're reviewing), education (so you can share something with a class), etc. Fair Use also protects "transformative works," where you use some already extant thing and turn it into something entirely new. Let's Plays are arguably covered under this classification; since gameplay is such an integral part of a video game, footage with commentary would be transformative enough to be protected.

That's the legal argument for it, anyway. There's certainly room for disagreement, neither side has taken this to court. What's important to note is that every publisher besides Nintendo has accepted it as valid and allow for this content to be made; many publishers even outright encourage it.

You say that developers should be paid for the hard work, and I certainly agree, which is why I support Let's Plays even if I don't care for them much myself. LP's can be powerful promotional tools, especially for smaller titles, and it's something that the developers/publisher don't even have to pay for. There are a plethora of games that would have languished in obscurity if some Youtube personality hadn't exposed them to an audience of millions (look at the explosion in popularity that Amnesia enjoyed after PewDiePie and others faffed about in it). Even big games can benefit from the boost.

By demanding a cut of the relatively paltry ad revenue and turn away huge sources of publicity and exposure, it seems that Nintendo can't see the forest for the trees, which is made all the worse by the fact that (as noted before) no other company has this problem.

It's also worth pointing out that this policy doesn't just inhibit Let's Plays. Even if we agreed that Let's Plays have absolutely no standing whatsoever, review content is completely, unambiguously legitimate and that's still hurt by this policy. They're subject to all the same terms and conditions, and giving Nintendo control over what's allowed to be posted, and who's allowed to be paid... it's a conflict of interest, to say the least.

Plus, we're on a website with a pretty healthy following of pirates. Let's not go throwing stones over what's "moral" in this sort of situation.

Nope. You are wrong.

Fair use isn't about what Let's players are doing. You got it all wrong.

And certainly playing the whole game is not about fair use.

Trust me, if there was even the slightest legal window to confront Nintendo, rich Let's Players would have done that. They are rich enough to hire a good lawyer...

Let's plays are not reviews. Nintendo isn't after reviews, it is after unfair use of their ip and products.

Also, your argument about exposure is pure bullshit. Are you a 12 year old that got brainwashed by PewDiePie and gang? For what is worth, the only time i watched let's plays was when i didn't want to pirate buy the game and waste my time on it and just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. For example, i watched a Last of Us 6 hour "movie" version instead of playing it, since all i wanted was the story. Sony didn't make money from me... I didn't even want to pirate the damn game, it was boring. I just liked the cutscenes...

 

[Vipera]

I have always operated under the idea that nobody owes you a living and would agree in principle there. Equally many of those whining seem to have no clue how this stuff works in the real world but I can not get anywhere near finding it intolerable to earn from it. Later you say about regulation and that is very much not the key to solving whatever problems that are faced here, or at least not additional regulation over what already exists.

What would a solution be for you, then? IMO we need regulations because large group of people are notorious to ruin nice things. If Kickstarter allowed more Potato Salad entries, we'd have the whole site filled with """jokes""" (there has to be another name for something dumb that's not funny).

I think that is very much the exception rather that the rule. Equally I do not want to go too far down this path but I am sure there are some reviewers, satirists and the like doing far better than some of the people that made the works they are looking at. Now review/criticism and satire are two big exceptions to copyright's protections and I have previously argued a simple let's play is not likely to fall under that but it is not worlds apart.

Reviewers are much different than a player. It's like comparing an essay to someone reading a book out loud. They serve the purpose of saying what they think about a game and warn others about it, without spoilers. They can act dumb as much as they like, as long as it's pertinent to the game (it's still not funny 99% of the times, but eh, it's legit).

There have always been vanity presses, there have always been kit magazines, there have always been rebundlers, there have always been those willing to lean on an import hookup or some capital to buy in bulk, the whole android as whatever thing to me is just the return of bedroom coders -- the C64, amstrad, amiga... era had no end of bedroom/garage based companies, when that went away there was the whole premium rate phone number shareware thing (and you better believe there was endless amounts of tat that was attempting to be sold, screensavers were always popular for some reason) and now we are back somewhere between the two. Most of those are considered legitimate businesses.

I'm taking the dude I paid not long ago to send me the full copy of Treasure Island Professional over some random idiot who spent 5 minutes on PC to make a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Programming something back then was an experience, and it's infinitely easier to do it now on Android than decades ago. I was able to make my own shitty app on Windows Phone that took me no more than 5 minutes once I got used to the commands (no, it's not available. It was a test app).
There weren't many copycats either. Yes, there were some Pac-Man clones who had the balls to be shareware, but they were isolated cases and they were nuked by the original creators, most of the times. It's not about "the game" anymore, it's "the profit", and this is what every Indie developer swore to God to have never taken part of.
Lol, I completely forgot about the trauma those stupid wallpaper/ringtone sellers were. Quite the scam, yes. But I despised them more than I despise everything else on this world and I'm glad it's a dead market now. I remember TV Ads asking something like 5€ weekly to have ONE wallpaper/Ringtone, most of the times being a famous song high-pitched enough to say "hey look it's Andy the duck who sings 10 seconds of Britney Spears!". Burn in hell and never return.
On the other hand, I still have somewhere a copy of a 2004 phone magazine that had a huge section dedicated to Palm games. Except some idiotic choices of design (a Terminator game where you had to buy ammo with real money to keep playing and some stupid 9/11 game) they were mostly good. And if they weren't good, they were at least cheap. But I clearly remember them all being creative and ad-free. Maybe some had a sponsor showing up when you opened the game, but it was a still-image. Like the developer logos when you start a game.
What do you have now? They are mostly P2W games, using the same formula over and over. There are no ideas, just money-grabbing.

I could go back to the exception thing but that might be more of a symptom of other issues -- as every kid that wanted to make games would jump at the chance to do the equivalent salaries in the games industry, though I do not have the greatest respect for most modern game coder types, is far lower than the equivalents elsewhere, to say nothing of the lack of career progression options.

Again, just look at how people take advantage of the weak part of the community, knowing they are going to spend thousands for P2W stuff. I miss good DLCs, at least they are honest-to-God ways of enlarging the game by earning something more. Better than "pay 150Eur and get a box full of red coins".

I would then say you are not looking hard enough. It has been a while since we have seen the likes of Dragoon X Omega II but there are still those doing very good work. Likewise I do not see an especially big distinction between hackers and many mod makers for PC games.

I'd be grateful if you could direct me to any major Rom hacking site that's still active. The ones I used to know are dead or not as much active as before. And I prefer platform hacks rather than RPGs.

Watching gameplay is not what floats my boat but neither is listening to opera and plenty of people seem to enjoy that. To that end I do not have a problem with it.

Listening to Opera is different than watching someone play a game. Operas aren't intended to be played by everyone, games are. If you watch a Let's Play either you don't want to bother with the ungodly amount of difficulty/dead points of the game (while still preserving the "Player effect" a Speedrun can't give) or you are a pretty lonely person who is afraid of playing something by yourself, fearing people might consider you a loser. And before somebody ask no, most of the Dark Soul Let's Plays aren't made for the former.

 

[Hells Malice]

-the "free advertisement" shit is doubtful at best. Reviews and critiques may help a good game sell better, but let's plays? I've seen let's plays consisting of multiple hours (seen as in 'seen the description'. Not watched them entirely). Are we really to believe that people watching all that, see all the spoilers and gameplay, are going to go out and buy that game afterwards? I don't think so. It's the same case as with movies: show too much of it and people won't buy it anymore.

It depends entirely on the game, however things like TotalBiscuit's "WTf is..." series have gotten me to buy probably DOZENS of games I probably never would have even thought I would have.
Minecraft is a huge example as well, I guarantee a very large chunk of its popularity is attributed to the insane amount of youtube content that game sees.
If a game looks fun, people will probably buy it if they can. I've bought plenty of games I watched that looked fun.

-this is a relatively new phenomenon. I kind of wonder how cocksure everyone is in their conviction that this is a failed marketing move by nintendo. I'm open to suggestions as to why, but thus far, nobody seems to be able to tell why that would be (in fact, nobody even seem to mention that at least they're not hindering anyone from uploading video's anymore).

It's not that people haven't explained, you're just too ignorant to look past your own misguided and uninformed opinion of Let's Plays and their impact on the gaming industry. Let's Plays are very much free money, especially for a non-story driven game developer like Nintendo. Nothing Nintendo makes is ruined by watching it. Thus Nintendo is basically refusing free ad revenue, because big youtubers who make videos for a living wont touch any of their games with a 100ft stick, thus losing Nintendo free advertising for their games. A lot of big youtubers do actually stay away from story driven games BECAUSE any LP of them will be the exact same, thus potentially losing views. If a person has two people playing the same game in their sub box and it's story driven, they will likely pick their favorite to watch. Youtubers know this, and that's why they tend to avoid them.
Also i'm not sure you could call something thats been going on for quite a few years now 'relatively new'.

-I don't watch let's plays, but it wasn't hard to see that most of them revolve around AAA-titles. In other words: the games that would've sold good anyway. Even more: due to the lack of decent third party titles, pretty much all that's left to do let's plays on are about titles of already very known and established franchises. And it's not like the sales of those titles will go up if there are many let's plays floating around.

Yes it was quite apparent you don't watch LPs. I've got probably about 10 subs, and none of them really do AAA games. Totalbiscuit does WTF is, and one other guy does play one here and there but that's not typically where the money is for youtubers.
But it's not like it matters, when has free advertising ever been a bad thing? That's right: never. It's a known fact that popular games for Let's Players tend to also sell quite well during that period of popularity. Again I reference back to minecraft which probably would have died down a long time ago had it not been for Let's Players keeping the fires burning for a looong time. Multiplayer games in general are a staple for Let's Plays because they're always different. You could have 10 people in your sub box doing Garry's Mod, but you'll probably watch them all because every persons video will be different. Same for MOBAs and all that stuff, and things like Mario Kart.

-finally: do people follow let's players or rather the actual game being let's played? I would think the latter. So let's say there are 10 let's players in total. 9 of them are disgusted by ninty's policy and do stuff on other franchises. The tenth does a let's play and gets half the money. But because not that many people make these let's plays, he'll end up with more hits (and thus more money). So in the end, it scares away those who only do let's plays for money. And it may be black-and-white'ish, but...how exactly is that a bad move?

Your whole post screams moronic ignorance, but the first sentence there really, really shows just how little you actually know about Let's Play culture.
A majority of people watching Let's Plays are following the person. When I sub to someone I really don't give two shits what they're playing, i'll watch it for the personality. This is an incredibly common thing. This is why you subscribe to somebody, instead of simply watching the series you're after and then bouncing. You typically GO to a channel to watch a game, you STAY for the personality. A majority of views on bigger channels are from a loyal fanbase watching anything that person puts out. So if a youtuber gets a steady 200k views per video, it sure will fluctuate depending on the game but that 200k will always be there. So that means that's 200k views on a Nintendo game that might be from people who never would have sought out to watch that particular game, but did anyway because the youtuber they like decided to play it. Either they wont buy the game (and wouldn't have anyway) or they surprisingly love it and decide to buy it to play it themselves.

So tell me, how does that harm Nintendo? Lets Plays do not in any way harm sales to any significant degree. Mostly because the boost in sales makes up for any decrease it may see. Especially, again, for non-story driven games like every single one Nintendo makes.
The people who do youtube for money are the ones you WANT to play your game, because no one gives two fucks about the guy who gets 5k views. You want your game being watched by hundreds of thousands of people because chances are even if 1% of 100,000 viewers were to buy the game, that's a lot of goddamn sales. More than Nintendo would get leeching off of other peoples profits.
Especially mammoth channels like PewDiePie. I have no clue what his views are like, but I know they're guaranteed 1million + views. There's no money that can BUY that sort of advertising and yet they could be getting it for free, but instead choose to shoot themselves in the foot.
Nintendo are out of touch retards who are funnily enough, just as ignorant as you are on just how impactful Let's Plays can be for sales.

Which is exactly why Nintendo and you are fucking idiots.
The one thing you did well, was show probably how Nintendo's board room of 90 year old men thought out this move, by being completely ignorant and uninformed and making a horrible decision based on their own empty shell of an opinion on the subject.

 

[FAST6191]

What would a solution be for you, then? IMO we need regulations because large group of people are notorious to ruin nice things. If Kickstarter allowed more Potato Salad entries, we'd have the whole site filled with """jokes""" (there has to be another name for something dumb that's not funny).


Reviewers are much different than a player. It's like comparing an essay to someone reading a book out loud. They serve the purpose of saying what they think about a game and warn others about it, without spoilers. They can act dumb as much as they like, as long as it's pertinent to the game (it's still not funny 99% of the times, but eh, it's legit).


I'm taking the dude I paid not long ago to send me the full copy of Treasure Island Professional over some random idiot who spent 5 minutes on PC to make a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Programming something back then was an experience, and it's infinitely easier to do it now on Android than decades ago. I was able to make my own shitty app on Windows Phone that took me no more than 5 minutes once I got used to the commands (no, it's not available. It was a test app).
There weren't many copycats either. Yes, there were some Pac-Man clones who had the balls to be shareware, but they were isolated cases and they were nuked by the original creators, most of the times. It's not about "the game" anymore, it's "the profit", and this is what every Indie developer swore to God to have never taken part of.
Lol, I completely forgot about the trauma those stupid wallpaper/ringtone sellers were. Quite the scam, yes. But I despised them more than I despise everything else on this world and I'm glad it's a dead market now. I remember TV Ads asking something like 5€ weekly to have ONE wallpaper/Ringtone, most of the times being a famous song high-pitched enough to say "hey look it's Andy the duck who sings 10 seconds of Britney Spears!". Burn in hell and never return.
On the other hand, I still have somewhere a copy of a 2004 phone magazine that had a huge section dedicated to Palm games. Except some idiotic choices of design (a Terminator game where you had to buy ammo with real money to keep playing and some stupid 9/11 game) they were mostly good. And if they weren't good, they were at least cheap. But I clearly remember them all being creative and ad-free. Maybe some had a sponsor showing up when you opened the game, but it was a still-image. Like the developer logos when you start a game.
What do you have now? They are mostly P2W games, using the same formula over and over. There are no ideas, just money-grabbing.



Again, just look at how people take advantage of the weak part of the community, knowing they are going to spend thousands for P2W stuff. I miss good DLCs, at least they are honest-to-God ways of enlarging the game by earning something more. Better than "pay 150Eur and get a box full of red coins".


I'd be grateful if you could direct me to any major Rom hacking site that's still active. The ones I used to know are dead or not as much active as before. And I prefer platform hacks rather than RPGs.


Listening to Opera is different than watching someone play a game. Operas aren't intended to be played by everyone, games are. If you watch a Let's Play either you don't want to bother with the ungodly amount of difficulty/dead points of the game (while still preserving the "Player effect" a Speedrun can't give) or you are a pretty lonely person who is afraid of playing something by yourself, fearing people might consider you a loser. And before somebody ask no, most of the Dark Soul Let's Plays aren't made for the former.

Solution to what problem? Copyright does not need to be enforced like trademarks to remain valid. To that end play it how the devs/publishers will, I would view it more as free publicity though there certainly could be mitigating factors.

On joke entries then people have always had jokes at the expense of a system
Running for president
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...ld-trump-always-looked-like-a-publicity-stunt
Running for president

Amazon joke reviews...

Speaking of reviews no definition of review includes a lack of spoilers. Some embargoes do ask for a lack of spoilers at some level but that is a different matter. It may also come up in the discussion of the differences between reviews and critiques but that is a different matter.

Was that terminator buy more ammo thing a java/jme era phone game? If so I will have to look into it as I do not have many examples of early microtransactions.

"Programming something back then was an experience, and it's infinitely easier to do it now on Android than decades ago."
Basic, the language of choice during the Vic 20, C64, Amstrad, Atari... stuff from earlier kind of lives up to its name. Equally publishing is far easier now than it was 200 years ago, hell even 20 years ago and nobody should really be complaining about that. Indeed I am shocked that coding is not taught in schools the same way as native language, maths and science. Likewise vanity publishers have long existed and there are all sorts of things

ROM hacking wise I tend to only go between romhacking.net and here, platform games tend to suffer from lots of "my first go with a level editor" and it makes wading through that more than I care to do on a regular basis. Have a look for the tools and any forums attached to them or wikis with hacking info as they tend to have sites/forums attached to them (or active forums in turn link to them and will come up in search results).

"If you watch a Let's Play either you don't want to bother with the ungodly amount of difficulty/dead points of the game (while still preserving the "Player effect" a Speedrun can't give) or you are a pretty lonely person who is afraid of playing something by yourself, fearing people might consider you a loser. "

That seems like a very binary pigeon holing and so very easily dismissed, unless you want the difficulty thing to skew so far as "needing absolutely no input on my part".

Listening to opera may be different to watching gameplay, however both could still be entertainment for someone that is not me which is where that was heading. On "intended to be played" that is never something I feel the need to respect (probably a good position to be in if you are going in for the ROM hacking bit) -- nothing wrong with watching a film for its action scenes, listening to the instrumentals of a song, ignoring the race in a game and doing jumps/skids instead. Functionally I see very little difference.

Generally I have no problem with money grabbing, have never really believed anybody does anything "for the art" (it need not be money but purely for the art tends to see a reflexive derisive snort). Possible exception for when people do things for their fellow artists (few things are ever so well made as something designed to impress someone else with a similar skillset). In short go free market, you are far from perfect but I have not got anything better right now.

 

[TecXero]

Nope. You are wrong.

Fair use isn't about what Let's players are doing. You got it all wrong.

And certainly playing the whole game is not about fair use.

Trust me, if there was even the slightest legal window to confront Nintendo, rich Let's Players would have done that. They are rich enough to hire a good lawyer...

Let's plays are not reviews. Nintendo isn't after reviews, it is after unfair use of their ip and products.

Also, your argument about exposure is pure bullshit. Are you a 12 year old that got brainwashed by PewDiePie and gang? For what is worth, the only time i watched let's plays was when i didn't want to pirate buy the game and waste my time on it and just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. For example, i watched a Last of Us 6 hour "movie" version instead of playing it, since all i wanted was the story. Sony didn't make money from me... I didn't even want to pirate the damn game, it was boring. I just liked the cutscenes...

Some Youtubers may have more Youtube money than God, but I doubt many of them are rich enough to tackle Nintendo. Even if they were, why would they bother? A lot of people that watch LPs watch them for the Youtuber him/herself. LPs tend to be personality driven content. Nintendo content will require a cut of their profits, so they'll just avoid Nintendo content and do other games. There's plenty of games out there, so they aren't hurting for them. Even LPers that exclusively did Nintendo content have transitioned away from that well enough. So in the end, it would just be a waste of time and money for LPers with very little gain.

As for the legality, that's the legal gray area right now. Until it is settled in court or the laws are updated, it will continue to be a gray area.

There have been plenty of games that have blown up from exposure. Not everyone may collectively watch LPs, but word-of-mouth becomes rather powerful after 500K+ people see it. As for myself, I've found TotalBiscuit's "WTF is..." series great for finding Indie games I wouldn't have known about otherwise. It's not exactly LPs, but it is an example of Youtube exposure.

 

[RevPokemon]

I think another thing to add is the difference between is Nintendo doing what it can do vs what it should do.

Nintendo has full rights to do whatever they want with their materials, including the right to take whatever % of revenue from creators. In that case I again 100% support Nintendo's program because legally they have the right to do whatever they want with the IPs they own and have the right to regulate them.

Now I understand why some people are upset and likewise they have the right to be but it doesn't change the fact that Nintendo has the rights to their products. On the subject I find the whole "well it is free advertising" idea is bs. If that was the case companies wouldn't go after non licensed merchandize or what not. I see it as Nintendo views they have a right to x amount of dollars from money being brought in from partial use of its content, which is something I believe the have every right to do.

Ultimately I don't necessarily agree with all aspects of the program but I do believe they have every right to do it. But that's just my 2 cents

 

[TecXero]

On the subject I find the whole "well it is free advertising" idea is bs. If that was the case companies wouldn't go after non licensed merchandize or what not.

That's a bit different, as that's directly competing with their merchandise. The person that buys the non-licensed merchandise might not buy the licensed merchandise now, and (depending on if they use a fake name on it) might not even be aware of what it's based on. That would be more like if someone took the game, changed around some assets a bit, slapped a new name on there, and sold it as their own product. That said, I'm sure there's some people that felt they didn't need to buy a game because they got all they wanted to get out of it through a LP. I'm not saying LPs don't do harm, just that I think they do more good than bad.

 

[Gahars]

Nope. You are wrong.

Fair use isn't about what Let's players are doing. You got it all wrong.

And certainly playing the whole game is not about fair use.

Ah, yes, a stirring rebuke. You really proved your point here.

Trust me, if there was even the slightest legal window to confront Nintendo, rich Let's Players would have done that. They are rich enough to hire a good lawyer...

Ah, yes, because the average Let's Player is a modern day Jay Gatsby with enough spare cash to tackle an international corporation while munching on caviar?

In reality, the DMCA system makes it really difficult for channels to fight back against unfair takedowns, and that goes for even the largest ones out there. While someone could hypothetically take this to court, it's not going to be worthwhile for a video that'll make, at most, a couple hundred dollars before Google and the network take their cut. Even in the most egregious and obviously wrongheaded cases, a protracted legal battle would be wildly impractical.

(Also, do note that what Nintendo's doing isn't illegal, and I never said that it was. Nintendo is within its rights to try and pull this... and, in return, we're free to lambast them for it. Nintendo can go ahead on its own but, in the end, it's a poor decision and one that hurts them more than anyone else; it's kind of like playing Bop-Em Socker with your testicles.)

Let's plays are not reviews. Nintendo isn't after reviews, it is after unfair use of their ip and products.

...Except that reviews are also subject to the new policies and have to be submitted to Nintendo for approval. Nintendo would also then receive a cut of the review's ad revenue.

Also, your argument about exposure is pure bullshit. Are you a 12 year old that got brainwashed by PewDiePie and gang? For what is worth, the only time i watched let's plays was when i didn't want to pirate buy the game and waste my time on it and just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. For example, i watched a Last of Us 6 hour "movie" version instead of playing it, since all i wanted was the story. Sony didn't make money from me... I didn't even want to pirate the damn game, it was boring. I just liked the cutscenes...

You don't have to like something to recognize its popularity and brand exposure. PewDiePie's channel has 34.5 million subscribers, many of whom (as you seem to be aware) are very impressionable, very easily persuaded children. Can you not see how that's a huge marketing opportunity? If 5% of PewDiePie's viewers decided to purchase a game he features, that's still almost 1.75 million sales, along with the new word-of-mouth buzz that'd bring.

You and I might watch Let's Plays for different reasons, but you and I aren't the main Let's Play audience. Don't project so much.

Stay salty, bud.

 

[FAST6191]

As for the legality, that's the legal gray area right now. Until it is settled in court or the laws are updated, it will continue to be a gray area.

I am pretty sure the legal issues are clear cut -- the let's play concept does not inherently make it a review, a criticism, a piece of satire or otherwise something would count as fair use ( http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ ). To that end it is a pretty clear cut case of copyright worrying, maybe with a side order of trademark law (Microsoft and using game names in various content being a likely example there). They do not have to do anything about it though and that is where this discussion seems to appear.

What I might be interested to see is this going the same route as the film equivalents (mystery science theater people releasing dubs of their commentary for people to play over the top). Tool assisted speedruns have already got the tech in place to dodge the need to play games, even for those games with random elements if you are really good.

On the subject I find the whole "well it is free advertising" idea is bs. If that was the case companies wouldn't go after non licensed merchandize or what not.

Not all companies stop all things, though there are some interesting cases ( http://io9.com/fox-bans-the-sale-of-unlicensed-jayne-hats-from-firefly-471820413 ), but when they do after unlicensed merch it is likely more trademark law they are concerned with. You have to defend trademarks lest they become genericized and not enforceable
http://consumerist.com/2014/07/19/15-product-trademarks-that-have-become-victims-of-genericization/
The red cross and Doom if you want a more games related example.

 

[RevPokemon]

I am pretty sure the legal issues are clear cut -- the let's play concept does not inherently make it a review, a criticism, a piece of satire or otherwise something would count as fair use ( http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ ). To that end it is a pretty clear cut case of copyright worrying, maybe with a side order of trademark law (Microsoft and using game names in various content being a likely example there). They do not have to do anything about it though and that is where this discussion seems to appear.

What I might be interested to see is this going the same route as the film equivalents (mystery science theater people releasing dubs of their commentary for people to play over the top). Tool assisted speedruns have already got the tech in place to dodge the need to play games, even for those games with random elements if you are really good.




Not all companies stop all things, though there are some interesting cases ( http://io9.com/fox-bans-the-sale-of-unlicensed-jayne-hats-from-firefly-471820413 ), but when they do after unlicensed merch it is likely more trademark law they are concerned with. You have to defend trademarks lest they become genericized and not enforceable
http://consumerist.com/2014/07/19/15-product-trademarks-that-have-become-victims-of-genericization/
The red cross and Doom if you want a more games related example.

I hear what you say I guess my issue with most of the complaints with the creator program is simply the fact people are acting like Nintendo has no right to do this even though the do legally speaking (although it may not be write)

 

[Vipera]

Solution to what problem? Copyright does not need to be enforced like trademarks to remain valid. To that end play it how the devs/publishers will, I would view it more as free publicity though there certainly could be mitigating factors.

On joke entries then people have always had jokes at the expense of a system
Running for president
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...ld-trump-always-looked-like-a-publicity-stunt
Running for president

Amazon joke reviews...

That's satire, not jokes to get visibility. Unlike Amazon "joke" reviews, which got tiring after one week. They aren't funny, they are useless. Diamond HTML cables are useless? Then write a one-star review explaining why my cheap plated-gold cable is the same. You don't need to go all snob trying to be funny, because you aren't. Same for Steam reviews, they made the Steam voting system worthless.

Speaking of reviews no definition of review includes a lack of spoilers. Some embargoes do ask for a lack of spoilers at some level but that is a different matter. It may also come up in the discussion of the differences between reviews and critiques but that is a different matter.

I guess you could use spoilers, but they are still nowhere as bad as Let's Players, they are just bad reviewers (if not used properly).

Was that terminator buy more ammo thing a java/jme era phone game? If so I will have to look into it as I do not have many examples of early microtransactions.

It was either Terminator or Terminator Revenge. Can't find anything online, but the game is still up. I guess you could try it, since it's free (until you need grenades anyway). This Pay2Play was so dumb it never sold and no one remembers it.

Basic, the language of choice during the Vic 20, C64, Amstrad, Atari... stuff from earlier kind of lives up to its name. Equally publishing is far easier now than it was 200 years ago, hell even 20 years ago and nobody should really be complaining about that. Indeed I am shocked that coding is not taught in schools the same way as native language, maths and science. Likewise vanity publishers have long existed and there are all sorts of things

Publishing a book nowadays is much harder than you might think, compared to 20 years ago. Sure, you get to publish your book by yourself at no cost, but so is everyone else. You need gimmicks or a fuckton of advertising from someone to rise from the million of books available in the eBook market. Not only that, you must also compete with bots who make books by automatic Wikipedia searches (I'm serious. Look it up, as I don't want to give the one I found any visibility).
Writing was not difficult, but you had to have passion. There is no such thing as writing JUST for money. And those who are, well, are delusional people who will never get money. The only way they could do that is by, once again, riding memes.

ROM hacking wise I tend to only go between romhacking.net and here, platform games tend to suffer from lots of "my first go with a level editor" and it makes wading through that more than I care to do on a regular basis. Have a look for the tools and any forums attached to them or wikis with hacking info as they tend to have sites/forums attached to them (or active forums in turn link to them and will come up in search results).

I am going to check that one out. Thanks!

That seems like a very binary pigeon holing and so very easily dismissed, unless you want the difficulty thing to skew so far as "needing absolutely no input on my part".

I watched a Let's Play of Cat Mario in 200something because I hate trial & error games and admittedly I couldn't finish it. Then I watched speedruns of IWBTG to see what the fuss was all about, after playing the first levels for a good hour. There is nothing fun or "hardcore" in those kind of games.
If your focus is on the game, then it's fine. If you need to feel someone by looking at someone else being an idiot on camera and focusing the attention on him then sorry, but people like this are losers. They need a friend to play with or they will think it's gay to play by yourself.

Listening to opera may be different to watching gameplay, however both could still be entertainment for someone that is not me which is where that was heading. On "intended to be played" that is never something I feel the need to respect (probably a good position to be in if you are going in for the ROM hacking bit) -- nothing wrong with watching a film for its action scenes, listening to the instrumentals of a song, ignoring the race in a game and doing jumps/skids instead. Functionally I see very little difference.

You are still listing stuff that was intented to be listened/watched to something that was supposed to be played instead.
How about this: I'm part of a band and we work really hard to make our album. And when it finally comes out...people go hear untalented people who sing very badly over our songs and call them "covers", and because they are more famous than us, they get a fuckton more popularity than us. Yes, an album is a lot much shorter and less focus-requiring than an average-focus game, but you get the idea. And by the way, "official" cover bands still pay royalties, as it should be.

Generally I have no problem with money grabbing, have never really believed anybody does anything "for the art" (it need not be money but purely for the art tends to see a reflexive derisive snort). Possible exception for when people do things for their fellow artists (few things are ever so well made as something designed to impress someone else with a similar skillset). In short go free market, you are far from perfect but I have not got anything better right now.

GBA/NDS homebrew (with the exception of DSpec) were all made for fun. If people were as greedy as they are today, we wouldn't have gotten amazing stuff like Moonshell 2 and various freeware games. Someone even made a port of Another World on the freaking GBA, which was an amazing thing to do. We wouldn't have people who ported Doom on calculators, or showoffs who made C64/Spectrum demos, or anything like that. Without these people, sites like Kongregate would be just another shithole of easy P2W games, like phones' gaming section turned out to be.
You could say that's a good thing, because it means that more people have access to a revenue and therefore improving the quality of their games. After all, games like Aspirine on the Wii were fun but still very basic. However, the mass isn't directing the attention to creativity, rather to le funny memes, allowing games like Surgeon Simulator to sell as much as a real game while very few people know about Symphony. That, and the fact that now the market has been filled with money-grabbers who filled places like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight to promote their money-grabbing tactics. What do we get in return? 1 out of 4 Kickstarter entries are about Bicycle decks, something you can easily do without funding thanks to a website specialized into the making, and Greenlight has so many unfinished games it's not even funny to talk about. But this is way Off-Topic.

 

[FAST6191]

There was paid GBA homebrew, a few different pieces even.
I have also seen the race to the bottom and flooded market nature of things, I would still rather that than some kind of limited/sanctioned option though.

"You are still listing stuff that was intented to be listened/watched to something that was supposed to be played instead."
I see no functional difference. Sure the law would go into commercial reuse of a work and we were having that discussion elsewhere in this thread and related ones, however I can not see it as some kind of lesser or invalid form of entertainment.

If joke reviews trouble a rating system then the rating system was not up to par in the first place, and in the case of Valve I hear they/Counterstrike are using some kind of chess style rating system ( http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=312582297 ) so it is not outside their capabilities to do something fun. Even Amazon seem to have adopted some kind of verified purchase system (to say nothing of the ? people found this useful type systems).

Maybe I should have said printing/typesetting instead of publishing (though I would still hold it is considerably easier), such a thing would probably have lined up better with coding. Indeed the distinction between learning tex and knocking something more than functional together with libreoffice or something would be fairly good.

"I guess you could use spoilers, but they are still nowhere as bad as Let's Players, they are just bad reviewers (if not used properly)."
On the spoilers part I could not disagree more with that. Not every review warrants a scene by scene dissection but those that do often form some of the more enjoyable entertainment out there for me. Wander around somewhere like http://blip.tv/ and reviews of that nature are their main stock and trade.

"There is no such thing as writing JUST for money. And those who are, well, are delusional people who will never get money. The only way they could do that is by, once again, riding memes."
On the memes thing... and? Memes are no worse than tropes, which in and of themselves are not bad.

I would argue creativity is not some magical activity, if not only because of things like http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/Emily-howell.htm
If a robot can do it then I figure most humans can learn the patterns required (we even have models like hero's journey and tension curves). I am not sure how close we are to storybot 3000 but randomly generated games do well it is probably halfway possible today.

I think I will have to end with a song

 

[Nightwish]

I just find very irritating how these people act like they are entitled to money for riding a fad and get pissed when the original creators demand a part of their unfair earnings.

And I find it irritating that Imaginary Property owners (NOT creators) think they're the owners of culture.

The truth is, Nintendo is right on this issue. Which is astonishing, since they are usually wrong in everything lately.

Gameplay footage is still copyrighted material. Nintendo owns it, whether you like it or not. You never purchase the game itself, you are purchasing a licence to play it. In private. When you share the game in public, and you gain money from it, you are breaching the EULA. And the law...

EULA's are downright evil and void in many jurisdictions. I certainly pay them no mind, and if the company claims otherwise I have no issue ignoring the their claims.
And even where Nintendo has the the right to fully control derivatives (which is a fairly recent concept) does not in anyway make it right just because they and their buddies could afford to buy a few laws.

What we can all agree on is that PewPew is terrible, but there's a huge amount of good youtubers out there. Go watch Quill18 or Arumba play Paradox games, or Northerlion, or Wil Wheaton with boardgames.

Fuck, if people who watch people play games are losers, how the hell is Game Center CX so popular? Are we all losers?

 

[Vipera]

I'm too tired to reply to everything tonight. I will just reply to this

Fuck, if people who watch people play games are losers, how the hell is Game Center CX so popular? Are we all losers?

Bush was popular, Facebook is popular, Anaconda was a popular song, memes are popular, potato salad was popular... I'd say yes, yes you are. And no, I'm not going to watch anybody play games I can play by myself. I'm not that insecure of a person to need someone to tell me what's funny and what isn't while gaming.

 

[RevPokemon]

I'm too tired to reply to everything tonight. I will just reply to this
Bush was popular, Facebook is popular, Anaconda was a popular song, memes are popular, potato salad was popular... I'd say yes, yes you are. And no, I'm not going to watch anybody play games I can play by myself. I'm not that insecure of a person to need someone to tell me what's funny and what isn't while gaming.

I agree just because it is popular doesn't mean that it is well received by everyone (all those things you mention are popular yet have many critics). That is certainly true in gaming.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

I think I will have to end with a song

I am so upset that you posted this video I want to scream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Worry,_Be_Happy


Anyways, on topic, Nintendo's policy, like everything else they've done recently, is buttfuck retarded. As mentioned multiple times in this thread, practically every single developer and publisher does the complete opposite of what Nintendo does and encourages gamers to put their shit on Youtube. Like, Let's Players will literally get games days in advance from devs and publishers just so they can get a couple (read: millions) of people interested in their games. I mean, if Nintendo doesn't want free advertisements what the fuck ever.

 

[RevPokemon]

I am so upset that you posted this video I want to scream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Worry,_Be_Happy


Anyways, on topic, Nintendo's policy, like everything else they've done recently, is buttfuck retarded. As mentioned multiple times in this thread, practically every single developer and publisher does the complete opposite of what Nintendo does and encourages gamers to put their shit on Youtube. Like, Let's Players will literally get games days in advance from devs and publishers just so they can get a couple (read: millions) of people interested in their games. I mean, if Nintendo doesn't want free advertisements what the fuck ever.

Welp, I think it is safe to say Nintendo has had god awful PR since the Wii (confusing names, closing club n, lack of wiiu advertising). Its sad because they keep making great games yet the PR is screwing them.

 

[Nightwish]

I'd say yes, yes you are. And no, I'm not going to watch anybody play games I can play by myself. I'm not that insecure of a person to need someone to tell me what's funny and what isn't while gaming.

Oh my god, some guy on the internet called me a loser! I'm going to cut myself now!!!!111

That is so not the point of let's plays (the ones I care about, anyway) it's like you're not even trying.