Nintendo Claims Ad Revenue from User Generated Youtube Videos

Ethan Gach

I write about comics, video games and American politics. I fear death above all things. Just below that is waking up in the morning to go to work. You can follow me on Twitter at @ethangach or at my blog, gamingvulture.tumblr.com. And though my opinions aren’t for hire, my virtue is.

Related Post Roulette

11 Responses

  1. Fnord says:

    Legally speaking, I suspect YouTube can put ads on people’s videos for any reason without recourse. The price you pay for playing in someone else’s sandbox.

    Whether Nintendo actually has a copyright claim on Let’s Plays of their games is a separate question. I think there’s a decent fair use case to be made for Let’s Plays (for, in part, the reasons you cite in the post), but there’s no certainty here.Report

  2. Jim Heffman says:

    “watching someone play a game is not like actually playing the game in any important sense.”

    But then, some games are little more than “Dragon’s Lair” with cutscenes.Report

    • I’m not sure precisely what Jim is saying here due to the fact that I am not really into video games, but I think he’s getting at something pretty relevant if it’s a reference to how much of video games evolve around storylines.

      Which is to say, I think that there is something lost from the perspective of the game-creator if people can actually go through all of the motions and watch the videos without playing (and purchasing or renting) the game. So I can see a claim here on the part of game-makers, for at least some games and maybe all. To me, one of the few reasons I would play a whole lot of games would be to actually get to see the stuff you get to see by advancing.

      On the other hand, I’m not sure the extent to which Microsoft should have rights over Red vs. Blue.

      Seems like kind of a complicated issue.Report

  3. Steve says:

    As a gamer, and a wannabe writer, I had trouble deciding who I’d side with here. On the one hand, there is some deprivation of revenue. Games won’t be rented or bought or even played, as Will Truman said. People making a living off of this are basically skimming the top of Nintendo’s profits, so I can see why they would go after them. It’s their work, story, art, etc… and by watching a Let’s Play, for example, someone else is getting ad revenue for your work. Imagine if I walked around asking people to pay me to read them the Harry Potter series, and I’d provide the books, and I get a steady paycheck this way. I think that’s the analogy they are going with, libraries and other argumentative holes aside.

    On the other hand, there is a certain creative license here that needs to be respected. I have heard that You Tube also told Notch that he could get ad revenue from Minecraft videos. However, in this case, most videos are displaying creative works and are tutorials for the recreating the creative works of others. It’s kind of like an online strategy guide in this sense. It’s a different part of the same origami crane that’s forming here, and I can see a lot of trouble for You Tube/Google trying to squeeze this into a two category deal. Instead of a positive content match, videos would need to go on a review basis, something that would be time consuming and expensive.Report

    • ThatPirateGuy in reply to Steve says:

      I can’t speak to the legal side of the issue but it is a terrible marketing decision.

      The big youtubers were providing free advertising for Nintendo. Now they will avoid doing so in the future.Report

      • Steve in reply to ThatPirateGuy says:

        I don’t know enough to argue legally, but I have seen a few things argued over through creative license. As a marketing choice, I agree that it’s pretty bad, though.

        However it can be argued that we’re probably in the middle of the next video game crash. A lot of studios are shutting down and being bought out, and everyone’s trying to stay afloat. EA was trying to push everything to have online, and multi-player, and micro-transactions, for example, and “supposedly”, because I can’t recall where I saw it, a game needs a return of something like $5 million to be considered for a sequel. Meanwhile, just to stay relevant, we see a new Call of Duty every 6-12 months. Also, EA has said that there would be a new Assassin’s Creed every year until the players say stop.

        We’re running the market into the ground by being afraid to take risks, and so we’ve seen the rise of the indie game developers and too many sequels to the same games.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to ThatPirateGuy says:

        I’m wondering how much money the people were getting from these videos. Pennies, it seems to me.

        Nintendo is doing *SOOOOO* much damage to its own brand over pennies.Report

        • Steve in reply to Jaybird says:

          You have no idea. I think the ToS has it at about $0.005 per view and ad click. So, at 20 views/clicks the video uploader gets $0.01 and at 2000 views they make their first dollar. To make anything reasonably worth fighting over? 100,000 views would be about $50.Report

  4. John Biles says:

    The legal justification would be that the individual images and sounds which make up the game are all copyrighted by the game creators and while you have a license to play them on your game machine/computer, that license does not extend to public performance, in the same way that I have the right to play my LOTR DVDs on my computer, but not to rig up a projector and run my own movie theater with them.
    And fair use of copyrights mainly extends to academic use and parodies, neither of which apply here.Report