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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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I'm deeply impressed by your faith that GG people want to learn something versus just have an excuse to exercise rank misogyny on any woman who doesn't date her man forever, give him 2 blowjobs a day and wait on him hand and foot, as only a proper alpha male deserves. 

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As I said, AAAs and 'youtubers' are invincible.

 

And, of course, Jason Schreier scores nine c-trophies on the deepfreeze site. Not a source gamergate would want to draw on.

 

But that is... spectacular. Just spectacular. That... is corruption. :blink:

 

 

(Read the comments under the article. Do it. :) )

 

I was actually quite happy with a lot of those comments. The hypocrisy is just so palpable and obvious that pretty much everyone has to see it.

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http://kotaku.com/ftc-slams-youtube-group-for-deceptive-xbox-marketing-ca-1728237588

 

Come on gamergate. It's right there in front of you.

$30,000 fucking dollars. And we are supposed to perpetually feel sorry for these fucking Youtubers losing their advertising cuts to big bad Nintendo because they give "free advertising." Yuck.

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$30,000 fucking dollars. And we are supposed to perpetually feel sorry for these fucking Youtubers losing their advertising cuts to big bad Nintendo because they give "free advertising." Yuck.

Um, I don't think many youtubers get massive behind-the-scenes kickbacks. Most of them need ad revenue to pay rent, at least if they're trying to do it as a full-time gig.

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Obviously that's not what I'm saying. If you think Pewdiepie is equal to a gaming podcast or website, you are mistaken.

 

The popular Let's Players and Youtubers are flush with cash, everyone knows this. The ones trying to get by tend to be difficult to listen to and are probably not sustainable as an entertainment as an entertainment vehicle.

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I guess I should just drop it because it's super off topic but, ugh. I think people should get paid for their work where possible, and there are youtube channels that have more than 10k and less than a million subscribers. The 'popular' gaming youtubers are like 20 guys, compared to hundreds of people who just scrape by or supplement their day job income. Implying that anyone who isn't Pewdie successful therefore deserves to fail because invisible hand of the market is just super gross to me.

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Ad revenue plus the game makers taking their percentage seems like a fair enough way to pay people for their work I think as much as many Youtube fans complain. Talking over a video game you are playing simply just isn't a hard job.

 

Egregious payments over hidden advertising is super lame.

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I could swear we had a thread discussing Youtube ad revenue and the like, but now I can't find it for the life of me. Maybe I'm just thinking of the business side of videogаmes thread. Anyone with a better memory than me know for sure?

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Obviously the stuff in the article is super gross and unethical, but jumping from there to 'therefore no youtuber ever has a right to complain over having their ad revenue pulled' is a ridiculous jump.

 

Also I kind of feel like fuck anyone for telling other people their job is easy/fun and therefore should pay peanuts. I would think as an artist you'd have heard enough of that garbage to last a lifetime without paying it forward.

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Obviously the stuff in the article is super gross and unethical, but jumping from there to 'therefore no youtuber ever has a right to complain over having their ad revenue pulled' is a ridiculous jump.

 

Also I kind of feel like fuck anyone for telling other people their job is easy/fun and therefore should pay peanuts. I would think as an artist you'd have heard enough of that garbage to last a lifetime without paying it forward.

 

All of this. This is all true.

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Obviously the stuff in the article is super gross and unethical, but jumping from there to 'therefore no youtuber ever has a right to complain over having their ad revenue pulled' is a ridiculous jump.

I don't think they have a right to complain either way. Don't see how it's a jump either since a lot of these people, especially those under the Polaris network, which is owned by Disney, are going to the bank. So they can cry me a river.

 

A portion of their content simply just isn't their content at the end of the day. Same as fan artists who sell unnofficial prints of derivative works of copyrighted characters they don't own and T-shirt sites that get away with limited edition sales of IP they also don't own. All sites that openly sell this stuff, Teefury, Etsy, Society6, etc. have painfully obscure and slow DMCA complaint forms that make it tough for anyone who isn't Warner Bros. or Disney to police. So the Youtube revenue share to me is the obvious way to go that is fair for all (and streamlined to boot) and even then people are still making a lot of money to just live off recording them playing games.

 

Also I kind of feel like fuck anyone for telling other people their job is easy/fun and therefore should pay peanuts. I would think as an artist you'd have heard enough of that garbage to last a lifetime without paying it forward.

No as an artist I would never sell any derivative works I don't have the license or premission to. It's wrong and creators tend to not like it. I also don't steal shit off of Google images and use it in works because that'll also run into copyright issues. If I use music in a thing that I am doing for profit, like royalty free stuff, I pay the music creator for the license. I I respect them. Also learning art, music, writing takes way longer, more craft honing, and money for learning the digital tools and whatever else to even be equated to Youtube pundits. A proper games journalist is not equal to a Youtuber, it requires way more skill, knowledge, networking, obligation, and in some cases schooling. They make far less than the standard successful Youtuber.

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It seems pointless to police the effort people put into their work since there's no meritocracy anywhere and people get a lot of money for lazy work all the time.

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I don't think anybody here is taking issue with the idea that maybe we need new models to deal with this stuff, but more so that your stance on this first and foremost seems to be "fuck those guys for having money." Even as somebody who's not into how a lot of these people are using their platform and who's kind of competing with them through the entirely outmoded medium of writing, that's just super gross to me.

 

First of all, like Problem Machine said, because there are a few people making a lot of money and a lot of people making almost nothing off of this, so those kinds of hostile generalizations really only end up hurting the masses of lowkey streamers. Similar to how people basing their notions of what the writing industry is like on its few, highly visible successes contributes to a negative environment for everybody who isn't that level, because people assume that it's either about to happen and they can therefore treat you like shit in advance, or that it's somehow your fault you aren't quite there yet, or any number of other twisted notions that routinely make me want to gouge my eyes out.

 

Secondly, those are some incredibly dogmatic notions on the lines between Youtubers and real critics, and original and derivative work. Which, as a rule, don't tend to do complicated situations justice.

 

Like, I know from personal experience how many of my peers are experimenting with one form of video content or another right now, a lot of which relies on game footage or even that "talking over a game as they play it" format you loathe so much. The stuff they do isn't as popular as the big Youtubers, sure, but have you looked at what kind of games writing is the most popular lately? There's good stuff and bad stuff in both of these, and it's ridiculous to make judgements about how qualified somebody is based on what medium they work in.

 

Plus, the medium we are talking about here happens to be a collaborative one, in which developers act as authors by setting up the framework and players act as authors by creating a specific playthrough. I very much question the usefulness of any approach to this issue that disregards the second kind of creativity as worthless or parasitic. Besides, games are so widely disparate in how they weigh these two different parts that it don't see much sense in making general statement about Let's Plays and the like. I mean, I get how streaming something as linear as a Telltale adventure is kind of similar to sharing a movie online, but then there's stuff like Minecraft, incidentally one of the most popular games for this kind of stuff, and that's almost entirely about player creation.

 

Notch didn't build that sweet castle, sky fort or lava dome after all. He may have provided the tool necessariy to create them, but last I checked musicians also didn't pay royalties to instrument manufacturers just because they provided the tool with which they create.

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I don't hate the talk over a game format, I do often turn on Let's Play videos of a few Youtubers I like. The majority I have listened to outside of the ones I like tend to be loud or obnoxious. But I'm under no impression that these people need to be making more money than actual content creators. And you do admit it's a secondary creativity.

 

As you said it's collaborative, so exactly how is sharing ad revenue in need of a new model? What is wrong with Nintendo or whoever else taking their cut for much more difficult development work than talking over a game? The law as it stands protects copyright holders and that is what I think is right. My only issue is it's harder for people who do creative work to go after people profiting off their stuff if they aren't armed with clout and expensive lawyers. If someone wants to do something with the copyright they hold, all these Youtubers and fans of such try to act like they are bad people/companies.

 

Part of the issue with Gamergate is that these celebrities on Youtube are considered more "real" and more professional than actual games journalists who work within copyright law, do their due diligence, and research. They way they make money compared to a games journalist is fundamentally different. It's just not the case and I don't see a reason to continue to keep these people on a pedestal.

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The issue with the Nintendo thing wasn't them taking some of the money from ad revenue, it was with them taking all of the money from ad revenue, and when people didn't like that trying to strongarm them into an unrealistically restrictive partner program.

 

edit: Also, you're phrasing this like a zero sum game, like youtubers are costing game companies money, when the opposite is frequently the case, especially with indie games -- Edmund McMillen and Derek Yu both credit the phenomenon with at least part of the success of Isaac and Spelunky respectively. If this model, as it is, is beneficial to both parties, then why should anyone be double dipping -- either on the dev end, by trying to take more ad revenue, or on the youtuber end, by trying to extort costs for coverage (as has happened as well)?

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You still have multiple options to share revenue after Google takes its cut through that program: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/youtube-gaming-stars-blindsided-by-nintendo-s-ad-revenue-grab-1.3010550

 

Again it's still ultimately Nintendo's content and it's still their right as copyright holders, Youtubers are given the rights to stream games by the grace of the copyright holder sometimes with revenue sharing and sometimes without. I don't see what the issue is other than these people want more money in a market that didn't even exist before Youtube ads.

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I get syntheticgerbil's frustration at the scene because going off on what you said Problem Machine, yeah why should anyone be double dipping... except one side has been double dipping blatantly over past few years by strong arming their celebrity status vs lot of unknown devs.

 

I get this is just how market works, that few celebrity players will have more value than vast faceless developers because they are in higher demand, but it really pissed me off whenever some of them try to spin their ad revenue income as somethiing that is ethically beyond reproach when their share (not whole, parts of it) is threatened.

 

For specifics I like Angry Joe's reviews but whenever he goes on tandrum about ad revenue situation, he always goes off on this tangent about how companies actually should pay him for promoting (this was back when he was primarily doing reviews... wut... I think now he just went full on ad service player) their product and that mentality (which, by my casual and personal observation, seem to be pretty pervasive cause these e-celebs were busy spreading it as the default) just drives me nuts.

 

But yeah, not all youtubers are same, ton of them say they are happy with clean split model... too bad it just doesn't seem to work out because of market dynamics.

 

My favorite e-celeb probably has to be NorthernLion for this reason... he's one of few LPer/critic/streamer who actually seem to show genuine respect for the developer scene (to the point he is almost personification of that goofy stereotypical 'nice-Canadian') and I wish people like him best of luck amidst the changes to ad-revenue e-celeb market.  But it just feels like people like him are the few whenever copyright issues surface.

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I know I'm going to regret getting into something like this because I always do, but hey!

 

You still have multiple options to share revenue after Google takes its cut through that program: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/youtube-gaming-stars-blindsided-by-nintendo-s-ad-revenue-grab-1.3010550

 

Again it's still ultimately Nintendo's content and it's still their right as copyright holders, Youtubers are given the rights to stream games by the grace of the copyright holder sometimes with revenue sharing and sometimes without. I don't see what the issue is other than these people want more money in a market that didn't even exist before Youtube ads.

 

Except it's ultimately the video maker's content. Like it or not, people go to the these entertainers for the personalities, not the content. You said it yourself, you don't watch LPs made by people you find obnoxious. So even you are going for the personality. They just happen to be playing a game owned by Nintendo or whoever else.

 

Also I'm still reeling at your insistence that creating this content is somehow easy. You do realize this is a full-time job for these people, right? They don't just do it for fun and suddenly become millionaires. If that was possible, I'd be streaming every night.

 

Now, if you wanna argue that entertainers in general make more money than they should - relative to, say, a teacher or whatever - and that some of them are corrupt or harmful, then I'm all ears. But these people do work for their money. It doesn't just fall into their lap one day.

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Northernlion's usually who I watch as well, and he's straight-up stopped covering Nintendo games because he doesn't think they're worth the risk any more, since Nintendo has been extremely squirrelly and inconsistent about how they treat youtube coverage. Though big names on youtube sometimes do end up abusing devs, that's overwhelmingly in the case of small indie devs who don't have the clout to fight back, most of whom actually like being covered generally just not the exploitative specifics. On a larger scale, it's absurd to claim that even someone as famous as PewdiePie has the name recognition of Nintendo or Electronic Arts. This isn't a matter of youtube vs game dev, it's a matter of big guys vs little guys and the various exploitative tactics used by the big guys, whether they're big youtube guys or big game dev guys, against the little guys.

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Jim Sterling had an interesting article on common uses of copyright claims (for him at least). Another Monday, another copyright claim Essentially the videos he sees the most DMCA action on are for his Jimquisition series which are part diatribe, part research driven analysis into industry/games community tropes and events. This is work that he injects with a large amount of his own time and effort into and generally the in game footage he uses tend to be taken from publicly shared trailers or fellow journalists he's friends with. Anyway he funds himself through Patreon so watching his channel involves no adds. Except when Nintendo, Konami, or some other studio has DMCA'd him which enables adds on the channel in order to accrue a share of add revenue that didn't exist.

 

Or y'know something like Miracle of Sound receiving a DMCA claim over the original music he makes.

 

I'm not a big watcher of streams beyond pro vods or the occasional curiosity. I don't sub to some twitch streamer or feel engaged when they try to include their viewers to build a community.

But I do strongly feel that the people who's content I do engage with I do so because of their personality and what they add to the experience beyond just streaming gameplay. Like it takes effort to create an engaging stream. Plenty of people, even technically skilled people can make a video with them talking and playing but it's typically not enough to just watch someone else play the game there's usually some kind of hook needed which is provided by the presenter's input and if someone wants to monetise the effort they go to for community interaction, editing, blah then I don't see much of a problem with it. If the audience wants to turn off adblock so they can give the person revenue then at least some of that revenue should go to the person they intend to support right?

 

I feel like Twig here I'm on the precipice of a discussion that's going to give me the glazed over look that'll make my partner wonder why I even bother typing haha.

 

Anyway I'm primarily mentioning Jim Sterling because he is one of those people who went through traditional games media as a written word journalist before transitioning into almost full time video content with a widely offputting obnoxious style that I still like regardless. I'm not going to say he's super correct on everything or anything but as someone who has been on both sides of the fence I think it's worth noting that he values both fields of work/entertainment and doesn't just brush one side off for being unprofessional. 

 

I mean people give bug testers and game journalists the same spiel when they complain about work conditions or their work experience. "They play video games for a living! They should quit complaining about living their Hobby."

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This isn't a matter of youtube vs game dev, it's a matter of big guys vs little guys and the various exploitative tactics used by the big guys, whether they're big youtube guys or big game dev guys, against the little guys.

 

Yeah I think this is a good framing of my frustration overall.

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Except it's ultimately the video maker's content. Like it or not, people go to the these entertainers for the personalities, not the content. You said it yourself, you don't watch LPs made by people you find obnoxious. So even you are going for the personality. They just happen to be playing a game owned by Nintendo or whoever else.

It's both people's content being featured. If that were somehow not the case, then ultimately copyright law would not apply here and companies would not be able to DMCA take them down. The law already supports completely the opposite of what your saying.

 

Also I'm still reeling at your insistence that creating this content is somehow easy. You do realize this is a full-time job for these people, right? They don't just do it for fun and suddenly become millionaires. If that was possible, I'd be streaming every night.

Are you seriously saying compared to developing a game or writing as a game journalist it is not easy? I'm just being real here. I have very little sympathy for people in this job compared to someone who does the heavy lifting literally (as maybe someone in a warehouse) and figuratively (and a content creator to provide them content to create their content).

They are doing rudimentary video editing (if they edit at all) that anyone can do, a lot of people have poor sound quality and capture. It's based on some amount of charisma and also playing the newest games. Like how having an early copy of Metal Gear Solid V is gonna get you a bunch of ad revenue. Or my favorite, when Grim Fandango Remastered was released, the next day there were like 20 different complete streams of people sometimes talking (but not while cutscenes played). Good job?

 

Now, if you wanna argue that entertainers in general make more money than they should - relative to, say, a teacher or whatever - and that some of them are corrupt or harmful, then I'm all ears. But these people do work for their money. It doesn't just fall into their lap one day.

Except these are entertainers that base their content on someone elses content.

 

This isn't a matter of youtube vs game dev, it's a matter of big guys vs little guys and the various exploitative tactics used by the big guys, whether they're big youtube guys or big game dev guys, against the little guys.

Except small indie developers or really small creators of any sort have little recourse when it comes to things like Youtube videos or fan derivatives, because then somehow they are assholes for exercising their right as a copyright holder. So yeah, small dev trumps small Let's Player every time. But again all the money is flowing to Polaris types, so I don't know exactly who you are arguing for.

 

Do you really think making a video of you talking over a video game should be a sustainable full time job for everyone who attempts it?

 

That's the real tragedy of this. Unfortunately you only have ammo coming from big publishers and developers.

 

Jim Sterling had an interesting article on common uses of copyright claims (for him at least). Another Monday, another copyright claim Essentially the videos he sees the most DMCA action on are for his Jimquisition series which are part diatribe, part research driven analysis into industry/games community tropes and events. This is work that he injects with a large amount of his own time and effort into and generally the in game footage he uses tend to be taken from publicly shared trailers or fellow journalists he's friends with. Anyway he funds himself through Patreon so watching his channel involves no adds. Except when Nintendo, Konami, or some other studio has DMCA'd him which enables adds on the channel in order to accrue a share of add revenue that didn't exist.

What he's doing is under copyright law then and the DMCA strikes on him shouldn't have recourse. But I'm not arguing against those who do traditional review and critical content. That's always been protected under copyright law.

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The law hasn't remarked on Let's Plays, which are probably fair use exceptions or original performances, and using copyright law as an example of something that makes sense and is worth paying attention to is pretty reaching.

DMCA takedowns also rarely actually have anything to do with law. A form letter gets sent to YouTube and they take unilateral action.

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