The Business Side of Video (Space) Games EXCLUSIVELY ON IDLE THUMBS

[Mangela Lansbury]

Do you guys think people should be able to upload full-length movies to youtube as "let's-views" with their commentary over the top? Stream them on twitch?

 

Granted, I don't really know where I fall on this, as I watch a ton of twitch and mostly hate our current copyright system.

 

I expect that a ton of studios would be ecstatic at the exposure, and willing to grant license to streamers / lets-players to provide what amounts to free publicity, but there's also probably a set of studios (maybe ones that do more story-driven stuff) that are going to lose sales if people can watch full playthroughs online. I know that I have put off buying The Forest and just watched people stream it on twitch instead. Maybe without the availability of protracted playthroughs the developers would have 15 more dollars.

 

I imagine that there's a similar dynamic with Gone Home and Walking Dead. Maybe there will be with Firewatch as well?

 

(DEFINITELY NOT A SOLID AND COMPLETELY THOUGHT-THROUGH OPINION HERE)

 

I've seen a fair amount of games coming out with things like materials or content usage licenses, which are basically guidelines for how you are allowed to stream/make videos from their games. Here's FFXIV's policy as an example, or Microsoft's policy for another. Generally, you're allowed to stream or make videos and profit from them using advertisements (for instance, through a YouTube partnership), but you're not allowed to sell the video outright. Blizzard's policy goes so far as to make special note of the fact that you are not allowed to make money from videos of their games except by advertising via partnership programs on popular video sites.

 

There are some very grey areas, though. For instance, Activision buys a license from EOTech to represent EOTech's holographic sights in their games. I have no idea what would happen if EOTech (or their parent company, L-3 Communications -- I think EOTech's legal department is one person so she probably wouldn't tackle it herself) took issue with a video that said bad things about the way a sight looks in a video from a Call of Duty game.

 

I remember there being a big deal with Nintendo not allowing Evo to stream Smash at some point, and Nintendo generally being really controlling of their content on YouTube, but I can't find their official policy (ie, it wasn't on the first page of google results from my first search).

[Twig]

Merus: This video is really good. Thanks for relinking it. I had it open from the previous page and accidentally closed the tab at some point and probably would have forgotten to watch it altogether.

 

Anyway this video is really good. It's a lot of things I've been saying about the whole Phil Fish debacle for a long time, so maybe I just think it's good because it's confirming a lot of what I believe, but whatever. What a disgusting mess this all is.

[Merus]

I particularly like the point about how it's not hard to do your own promotion when your elevator pitch is a three second gif. It's not like Phil Fish is a man with extraordinary control over his message.

[Henroid]

Lots of developers are fine with Lets Plays, some aren't.

 

Some amount of developers are fine with people monetizing Lets Plays, and some aren't.

 

We need to live in a world where the ones who aren't okay with all this (and thus don't give permission) aren't demonized for it.

[Griddlelol]

.

 

That was incredibly awkward to watch. 

[syntheticgerbil]

We need to live in a world where the ones who aren't okay with all this (and thus don't give permission) aren't demonized for it.

1,000 times yes. It's not like those who feel this way don't have a legitimate point when meanwhile people who just play games and record themselves doing so are making way more money per year than the people who actually work on them. I don't see how that is at all fair.

When considering that, all of this defense that a plethora of Let's Plays are free advertisement for developers and developers should be grateful doesn't sound so solid when not one chunk of that goes to the creators. Pewdiepie making four million a year. Fucking hell.

[Justin Leego]

And then there's the question of how much of a channel's generated revenue actually makes its way back to the host.

 

Thematically speaking, excellent timing on behalf of the This Is Phil Fish video.

[SuperBiasedMan]

We need to live in a world where the ones who aren't okay with all this (and thus don't give permission) aren't demonized for it.

 

This is the problem with the general entitlement that a lot of people just want the content and don't make any effort to really level headedly look at why the developers might not like it, just assuming it's greed/censorship. I think in some ways it's similar to discussing piracy where some people think the developer has no right to restrict piracy but the belief that all content should be videoable seems more ubiquitous.

 

1,000 times yes. It's not like those who feel this way don't have a legitimate point when meanwhile people who just play games and record themselves doing so are making way more money per year than the people who actually work on them. I don't see how that is at all fair.

When considering that, all of this defense that a plethora of Let's Plays are free advertisement for developers and developers should be grateful doesn't sound so solid when not one chunk of that goes to the creators. Pewdiepie making four million a year. Fucking hell.

 

Often the idea behind the free advertisement argument is that these big people making a lot of money do get big sales spikes, when the time of a video being posted and the sales chart are compared you can draw a pretty clear correlation. Of course it doesn't work for every game, but when it does then the developer just got a large burst of exposure in a particularly shareable and digestable way. 

 

Also it's worth noting that depending on the video there can be significant work put into it. There's a difference between playing through Gone Home, recording it all and putting up raw unedited content and playing the latest Call of Duty game, recording hours of footage and then editing it down to show key moments while you record a voice over to talk about what happened at various points. People exist all along that spectrum and there is no blanket case, especially when some videos are more about the person that the content. For example, I do watch one Youtuber who mostly makes TF2 videos, but he recently just cut together an edit of a cooking show where he made fun of the head chef being crazy with his random format. The way he makes his videos is what makes me interested rather than the idea that I'd rather watch him than play TF2. Obviously that's an example in the sea of let's players, but there's various different approaches people can take.

[SecretAsianMan]

My personal opinion is that I think devs probably should be getting some of the money.  Similar to the Minecraft EULA thing, LPs and other such things are based off of someone else's works, so I think it's only fair that they get something out of it.  I'm not saying all the money, or even a majority of it.  But more than zero.  In a way I almost see videos as something akin to mods in that they are new and unique content based off of existing content.

 

That said I don't think that the default position is automatically that videos are equal to piracy.  The bottom line is the thing that makes games different from movies and television, the interactivity.  Watching someone play a game is almost never going to be the same as playing the game yourself.  It might relieve you of the desire to play the game, but a review from a place like IGN is likely to do that as well.  If watching a LP is enough to make you not want to play the game yourself, you probably would never have bought it anyway.

[syntheticgerbil]

ften the idea behind the free advertisement argument is that these big people making a lot of money do get big sales spikes, when the time of a video being posted and the sales chart are compared you can draw a pretty clear correlation. Of course it doesn't work for every game, but when it does then the developer just got a large burst of exposure in a particularly shareable and digestable way.

Oh for sure. I get the feeling more often than not it's just people playing a game everyone already knows and reacting over it, splitting it in to 30 videos each with an ad at the beginning and end. But either way, there's no way to tangibly measure how these contribute to the sales of the actual game but you can measure exactly how much someone is making in ad revenue off said game.

 

Also it's worth noting that depending on the video there can be significant work put into it. There's a difference between playing through Gone Home, recording it all and putting up raw unedited content and playing the latest Call of Duty game, recording hours of footage and then editing it down to show key moments while you record a voice over to talk about what happened at various points. People exist all along that spectrum and there is no blanket case, especially when some videos are more about the person that the content. For example, I do watch one Youtuber who mostly makes TF2 videos, but he recently just cut together an edit of a cooking show where he made fun of the head chef being crazy with his random format. The way he makes his videos is what makes me interested rather than the idea that I'd rather watch him than play TF2. Obviously that's an example in the sea of let's players, but there's various different approaches people can take.

 

Yes, I forgot about this. I really feel like this should be taken in to account and maybe muddies up exactly what money should (if it should) funnel back to the developers. Like, Jontron on Game Grumps is just a lot of talking over the span of hundreds of videos where probably tons of ad revenue was generated. However Jontron on his own channel is very much his own creation and something people come to watch for his antics and not any particular game. I don't really know where I'm going with this, just taking note, I suppose.

[Bjorn]

Has anyone ever noticed that Phil Fish uses a picture of Andy Kaufman as his Twitter avatar? Increasingly as time passes, I kind of suspect that his entire presence in the games industry has been one elaborate prank.

 

I've wondered for awhile if he didn't just decide that he might as well embrace the image the Internet gave him and run with it, Kaufman style. 

[Twig]

Let's Plays are basically the MST3k/Rifftrax of video games (except video games are interactive experiences, so it's not a perfect comparison - but it is the closest). People would rightly be upset if Rifftrax started selling the movie with their commentary overlaid on it without permission, and yet people who do Let's Plays get away with exactly that all the time.

 

It IS kind of ridiculous. When Nintendo tried to shut down LPs a while back, I didn't much care, because they're a giant corporation and they get tons of money elsewhere. But when small indie devs who make less money than this annoying pewdiepie guy start complaining, I think we're obligated to listen. Too bad it's Phil Fish so the message is once again lost.

[Dewar]

1,000 times yes. It's not like those who feel this way don't have a legitimate point when meanwhile people who just play games and record themselves doing so are making way more money per year than the people who actually work on them. I don't see how that is at all fair.

When considering that, all of this defense that a plethora of Let's Plays are free advertisement for developers and developers should be grateful doesn't sound so solid when not one chunk of that goes to the creators. Pewdiepie making four million a year. Fucking hell.

 

To be fair, you're comparing the highest paid youtuber with an indie developer. You should really be comparing Pewdiepie to Ubisoft. Most Lets-Players aren't pulling down near that amount of money. Many are barely making ends meet, or have another job.

 

I thought about this some last night, and I realized a lot of my experience isn't really applicable to this argument, as I tend to watch lets plays of emergent story type games (CK2) or creative games (Terraria, Minecraft) that rely a lot more on the person playing it to create something worth watching, rather than a story that can be spoiled. However, I do watch a lot of GB quicklooks, so I guess those sort of fall in the same category. Here's a few examples of games I've watched a lot of content for recently.

 

1) The Yawhg: I figured I'd start off with the most depressing one. I've seen this streamed several times now. After the Idle Thumbs stream, I was all jazzed to buy it, but now I think I've seen enough and I'm no longer interested. I'm considering buying it anyway just to support the game, but I doubt I'd play it much. At the same time, I would have never heard of it if it wasn't for the streams, so not a net loss in revenue I guess.

 

2) Minecraft and CK2: I owned both of these games before I started watching videos of them, plus they are the ultimate "every experience is different" sort of games that watching a video of doesn't really ruin. I did buy EU4 after seeing a youtuber with a lot of CK2 streams seemed to enjoy EU4 as well, so I guess that's a net gain in revenue.

 

3) Persona 4: I had definitely heard about this game before Giant Bomb played the whole thing, and had considered buying it. I still kinda want to buy it, but the length combined with having seen the whole thing has deterred me. I've also been interested in picking up Persona 3, Persona 5, or that Persona fighting game after watching those videos and have been actively avoiding Persona 3 streams as to not spoil myself. I guess this makes the net revenue uncertain in this case, as we'll never know if I would have bought it without the GB videos to watch.

 

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, much like piracy, a watched video on youtube doesn't necessarily equate directly to a loss sale, if I had no intention of buying (or hadn't even heard of the game) before I saw the video, Still, I can see why more story heavy, less gameplay focused games such as Yawhg and Gone Home would be a little more concerned about losing sales than Minecraft probably is. Personally, I don't understand why people would ruin those types of games for themselves anyway, but that's just me.

[elmuerte]

Anyway Phil Fish yet again makes it harder for people who were on his side to stay on his side.

 

I think that kind of thinking is bad, really bad. Just because you agree on, or support somebody on a subject does not mean you agree on any subject.

Also, Phil Fish is just a person voicing his opinions.

[Twig]

I actually like Phil Fish and agree with his opinions on most things! My point was he's yet again expressing a controversial opinion which yet again riles up the internet which yet again makes anyone who doesn't hate him a temporary target, as it were, should they bother to express that they don't, in fact, hate him.

[SuperBiasedMan]

That said I don't think that the default position is automatically that videos are equal to piracy.

 

I'm not sure if you were addressing me or not, but I wasn't trying to say that the default is to say let's plays are equal to piracy. I was just trying to compare similar aspects to how people respond to both of them.

[elmuerte]

I actually like Phil Fish and agree with his opinions on most things! My point was he's yet again expressing a controversial opinion which yet again riles up the internet which yet again makes anyone who doesn't hate him a temporary target, as it were, should they bother to express that they don't, in fact, hate him.

 

At this point he might even be doing it intentionally. He's got that Kaufman avatar after all.

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm not sure if you were addressing me or not, but I wasn't trying to say that the default is to say let's plays are equal to piracy. I was just trying to compare similar aspects to how people respond to both of them.

 

Actually I was thinking of a Phil Fish tweet when I wrote that.  My comments weren't directed at anyone specific, just a general response to the whole thing.

[SilentBtAmazing]

Why don't soccer ball manufacturers get royalties when their products are played on television for profit? Relevant?

This discussion surfaces a bias of mine, which is that games that do not significantly empower the player are just not fun to me at all, anymore. I prefer to read stories or watch films when it is pure narrative.

Back to the Future, The Walking Dead, the Uncharted games, most Call of Duty-type games are all things I just cannot finish. I really just feel like if what I do in a game is completely channelized or has a couple artificial routes, then I just really don't have any power and therefore do not want to play.

This sort of relates to my feelings on the topic at hand which is that most video games I personally value will be less vulnerable to getting ruined by a LP / QL. I haven't played Fez but I would guess that watching a LP of it is primarily about enjoying the performance of the player or their commentary - which to me is more analogous to watching someone play sports or a specific piece of music of something.

I would argue that this category really should be somehow protected, genius speed runs / eggplant runs / whatever to me seem like a form of performance art in their own right.

[syntheticgerbil]

That analogy doesn't work. A soccer ball is not a creative piece of media for someone to consume, it is a thing that has already been bought and paid for and will be bought many times over for the sake of the game.

 

And also a soccer ball manufacturer does ultimately get paid ahead of time whether the game is any good or not. Should anyone on TV see the logo on the soccer ball, they also get the "free" advertising all these Let's Players claim they give. Sounds to me like the Let's Players gave you some free games though, considering you didn't actually have to purchase or play any of those.

[Architecture]

Why don't soccer ball manufacturers get royalties when their products are played on television for profit? Relevant?

Adidas pays for the privilege. It's "promotional consideration."

 

http://theconversation.com/nike-adidas-and-the-world-cups-marketing-war-28088

[Justin Leego]

That's where the analogy holds up better, as the more well known YouTubers will have an avalanche of games sent to them for free by developers and publishers.

[SecretAsianMan]

This sort of relates to my feelings on the topic at hand which is that most video games I personally value will be less vulnerable to getting ruined by a LP / QL. I haven't played Fez but I would guess that watching a LP of it is primarily about enjoying the performance of the player or their commentary - which to me is more analogous to watching someone play sports or a specific piece of music of something.

 

That's sort of how I feel about it too.  The LPs I watch are mostly not one person, but a group of people, so the games played are usually multiplayer games.  There's little to no narrative involved and if there was I wouldn't be watching for that.  What I enjoy is the group interaction, both with each other and the audience.  I would never want to see a LP of a game like Gone Home or something that relies on narrative because that's such a personal experience.  At least, I wouldn't watch one until I had played the game myself and even in that case, I'm not there for the game's narrative but the thoughts of whoever is playing it.  Really the only way a LP would ruin a game for me is if it showed really terrible gameplay or something, which is information that would come out of a review as well.

[Roderick]

Johnnemann Nordhagen has apparently quit Fullbright to form Dim Bulb Studios: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219458/Fullbright_Company_cofounder_launches_new_studio_Dim_Bulb_Games.php

 

Interesting news, and I wonder what the implications will be for Steve. Delays for any new project, or was this something you Fullbright coming?

[JonCole]

I think I also recently read imagined that Fullbright's lead programmer left for Oculus, when it was in fact Supergiant's lead programmer.