Nintendo: Still Screwing with Youtube Content

You're right, you can. In fact, that's what's already been done.

"They're shooting themselves in the foot"

Okay? So that's what some random guys (you, the LPers, and the LP watchers) have said. Show me the research that says these LP's impact sales so significantly, that it's more profitable than just flat out taking a cut from the LP'ers. Because from what I've witnessed, LP's are far more influential to small indie studios, rather than the pop culture IP's that nintendo releases

You're going to have to explain the bit about big publishers, I'm not informed enough to see your point.

I think it's still amongst the realm of "Free Advertisement" though, assuming the game is good. If an influential Youtuber plays your game, and shows it as even remotely good, you're getting audience with no cost to yourself

It's a matter of scale, and I don't think any of us have the data to back up one side or the other from a profitability standpoint. Nintendo could very well make more money off LP royalties than the "free" advertising gets them in game sales.

Nintendo(and every other large studio) gets free advertising in the form of rabid fanboys already. There's no telling how much LPers have an effect on sales for them. The people most likely to have that information are Nintendo themselves.


I think it's important to note that the NCP ONLY applies to first party Nintendo and not just anything on a Nintendo console. Not Pokemon, not Smash Brothers, not Kirby. The other studios are still free to do whatever they want with their IPs.


I have no idea where to stand on the issue. There's too much that I don't know about it.

I think the only real source of data to go by is that Western Publishers (who as we're all fairly aware, are NOT arbiters of generosity) have on the most part seen fit to embrace the whole Youtuber / Let's Play culture.

That's not necessarily true, there's definitely a very, VERY large demographic of people who are more than happy to just watch the game being played; just look at the success of Twitch and big name Let's Players.

That demographic, because they're watching someone else playing the game, will get to experience the content of the game second hand without paying a single penny to the creator of that game.

It'd be free advertisements if the majority of that viewer base would consider buying the games themselves, but that's not the case. What happens instead is they watch someone else play through the entire game, then they got to watch that person play through a whole other game without paying a single penny to the developers and publishers of that game.


To put it in a similar real world situation, you could go to a shop every day to pick up a news paper, but the store clerk says to you, "Hey, I've already bought this newspaper, and scanned and printed it for other people to read. I'll let you read it for free if you want and you'll never have to buy the news paper yourself, I've even circled out all the good stuff... I've kinda replaced some of the ads in the paper with ads for stuff I sell at my shop, but you'll never have to buy a newspaper again!"

It's not the same experience as reading the newspaper, there's no coloured printing and some of the pages are scanned funny; but you get to experience the articles of the newspaper without any issue. Meanwhile, the store clerk gets to advertise his products (or products that sponsor him) which gets him more money in the end.

Now the question is what will these people do if there is no video of a game X. Will they buy it? Or just ignore it because the real "experience" these people are after is watching somebody else (maybe a single special person they are a fan of somehow) play a game?
And how big is the demographic of people who actually buy a game after they saw some random video on youtube about it? Those people certainly exist as well.

Whoever said that, they weren't going to buy it anyway. No way. Not with that attitude.

So basically they lied, if not "exxagerated" or stretched the truth. When they said "They didn't feel the need to buy because they saw it played", they should have said "they weren't interested in buying it anyway, but it was interesting to watch it played".

Anyone who watches something they find decent, will usually get it just to try it themselves.

Honestly, there is demographic of people who would buy something blindly if any footage of it was intentionally missing. There was a game like that recently actually. Somewhere on the off-topic forum... Think it was called "The Slaughtering Grounds" or something. I mean, until people openly challenged it as a terrible game, it sold tons just because nobody knew anything about it one way or another. At the end of the day, they might have gotten more people to "look" at the game first-hand eyewitness, just because of claims it was that bad, so it probably did more good than harm

not if they're in it for the story

I highly recommend listening to the epilogue.

I'm just being pushed more and more in favor of Nintendo on this.

Eh, I watched a full, commentary-free fullplay of Catherine and it just made me go from "Passing interest/bored in London" to "Yeah, I'll give this a play".

You can argue that story-based games may get 'spoiled' by lets play, however it's a second hand experience. More often than not, people watch story-driven lets plays to share the experience with the person playing. Playing yourself and watching someone play can be very different. If one of the youtubers I subscribe to started playing a game I had already completed, I would still consider watching it.

There are cases perhaps where content protection is valid; however lets play, speedruns and the like do not fit that imo. The harm to nintendo of being hardline is arguable, but it annoying people should be obvious.

It would matter the most to horror games (not any of nintendo's content really), and even horror games book huge sales when featured on at least 1 let's play with 1m subscribers.

I am sure there is a curve, but I am also sure that curve falls where nintendo's games are at.

Ngh! Still worth it! Ngh!!!

Um...

What? It's Sir Tendo of Nin.