Nintendo has a somewhat sordid past when it comes to YouTube and Fair Use. Today, Nintendo is one of the last large organizations to truly accept YouTube as a modern form of marketing and sharing, but even as recent as 2015, it has shown strong hesitancy to embrace it fully. YouTube is a platform where anyone can post their opinions, thoughts and criticisms of video games, but it has also become a place where people can play and react to video games in front of a massive audience. This is called “Lets Play” or “Let’s Playing.”
Let’s Playing is a very popular and successful genre for Content Creators on Youtube today. Many people are creating livelihoods out of it. The most significant of these actually holds the title of Most Subscribed YouTube Channel: Pewdiepie. Pewdiepie is a Content Creator specializing in Let’s Play content on Youtube, with over 40 million subscribers and counting. With such a significant example of success for Let’s Plays, you would think that the genre has been accepted as a legitimate form of employment on Youtube. However, there are issues with the current model of Copyright in response to the legality of Let’s Play content.
The inherent problem with playing video games on YouTube lies in the fact that you are showing footage of the game. Many people, Nintendo in particular, have felt that when video games are being shown via YouTube, it discourages people from buying their games. Nintendo’s attitude has been relatively vindictive, even antagonistic, going so far as to try and shut down a charity event where people played one of their video games from the early 2000s, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Polygon, an internet based web news source dedicated to writing in-depth articles on gaming culture, business and artists, and were the ones running the event, had this to say about the incident, “They were not only trying to shut down the stream, they were trying to shut down the event; the Smash portion of the event…It’s their IP, we respect Nintendo’s decision to protect their IP, and we were going to comply with the legal department completely. So at that point it was over.” As a standalone case study, we see here not only the moral issue of attacking a charity event over issues of Copyright legality, but a look at the power and authority such laws grant Copyright Holders, alongside the complexity of the relationship gamers and reviewers have with these Corporations. Polygon, made up of people who are passionate about an industry built upon much of the work corporations like Nintendo have made in decades past, forces conflicts which arise between them to be handled more compromissory and with less of a public outcry or struggle. It really shows how difficult it can be, having to deal with a Company you’ve admired and supported for so much of your life, even when you become the target of a political attack which conflicts with your morals and livelihood.
While there is a case to be made about how showing people a game may cause them to not buy it, there is plenty of evidence to support the view that, by broadcasting someone else playing a game, people are more likely to want to play it themselves. When Pewdiepie played the game Flappy Bird in 2014, sales for the game exploded the very day his video for that game came out. Some argue that its success in this regard comes more from the fact that Flappy Bird isn’t as demanding or as narrative heavy as other games. In other words, it’s success came from having a lower barrier to entry than most. A strong argument in support of Let’s Plays, however, is seen in Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One. Both have built-in game sharing software, marketed as a tool for Social Media but utilized as a promotional platform, pushing sales figures up through the strength and influence of Let’s Play culture. It’s clear that these companies fully embrace the impact YouTube has on the gaming community.
In 2014, Nintendo started the Nintendo Affiliate Program, now called the Nintendo Creator’s Program. This program is a way for YouTubers to upload footage of Nintendo games while, at the same time, splitting the money they earn from it between Google, Nintendo and the User. Some view this is less as an affiliation and more of a taxation on Let’s Players sharing footage of Nintendo games. While this program allows Let’s Players to upload footage of their Nintendo games, several limiting conditions come as a result of this program, primarily that only games from a list would be allowed to be shown, and that the uploader of the video would only receive a small percentage of the profits the video would make, the rest being split between Nintendo and Google. Boogie2988, a Youtube Content Creator specializing in Let’s Play and gaming culture/news analysis videos, compounds the limiting pressures brought on by the Affiliate program with Nintendo’s proposed sale strategy, stating, “This makes Nintendo the only company in the world to ‘triple dip’. They charge you when you buy the console, they charge you when you buy the game, and now they charge you when you share the gameplay.” With other subscription based, auxiliary gaming costs, including DLC Season Passes (Downloadable Content meant to add to a product’s value after its initial lifespan) and Online Multiplayer Passes (Meant to pay for the overall cost of running, updating and operating servers for multiplayer games), Boogie argues that by adding another charge to gamers, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain loyalty or interest from costumers, especially when such charges have shown a history of abuse in the past. Because of this, the current gaming economy sees itself not only struggling to maintain power in an already established marketplace, but alienating potential buyers through intimidation, keeping the industry from growing by creating too many barriers for entry and complicating the image of gaming as a business.
Despite these conditions, many YouTube channels were very eager to join in on the Affiliate Program during its earliest phases, so much so that they had to put people on a waitlist in order to get into the program. This relates back to Polygon and its submissive response to Nintendo shutting down a portion of their charity event, in that it offers more insight into the level of respect Nintendo has garnered from its fans, as a Company, to warrant such willingness towards being part of its decisions, even before more information is made available. While this is a positive step towards recognizing that YouTube is a significant and valuable part of the gaming community, to assume that it has been executed more as a tax, to make up for presumably lost income as a direct result of people watching game footage for free, is not all that far-fetched. Much like with Sega’s Shining Force scandal, this will initially be treated as a costly mistake on the immediate sales numbers of Nintendo products. With its far-reaching and long-lasting impact on games media, the Nintendo Affiliate program will either be normalized into gaming media production or be violently contested as the current market model becomes more difficult to maintain economically, politically and morally. As far as Copyright goes, this will be a case study well worth revisiting, especially with its potential to mark the development of Copyright legislation and multinational trade legislation between the US and Japan.
Sources:
“Nintendo YouTube Creators Program Overloaded With Affiliate Requests.” International Business Times. N.p., 05 Feb. 2015. Web. 23 Feb. 2016
Tassi, Paul. “Nintendo Updates Their Bad YouTube Policies By Making Them Worse.” N.p., 6 Feb. 2015. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
Patrick, Matthew. “Game Theory: Flappy Bird, PewDiePie, and Pasta Sauce.” YouTube. YouTube, 18 Apr. 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2016.
Pitcher, Jenna. “Nintendo Wanted to Shut down Super Smash Bros. Melee Evo Event, Not Just Stream.” Polygon. N.p., 11 July 2013. Web. 01 Mar. 2016.
“Why Does Nintendo Hate Youtube?” YouTube. YouTube, 28 May 2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2016.
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