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Nintendo To Split Ad Revenue With Streaming Gamers
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past several years, as computers and networks have improved to handle heavier loads, it's become popular for people to stream video game footage over sites like YouTube and Twitch. Last year, Nintendo aggressively went after the players doing this for their games, hijacking the ad revenue generated through YouTube. It angered the gaming community, and was actively hostile to the people who were Nintendo's biggest fans. Now, Nintendo has partly walked back their position: they've agreed to share some of the advertising profits with the streamer. It's still hostile to the people actively putting Nintendo game playthroughs out there for others to watch, but it's a step in the right direction."
Gaming videos and streams are huge right now. Just immense. There are dozens of streamers and youtubers that have better ratings than many television shows. One obvious example is VanossGaming. One guy that makes funny game videos on youtube with seven million subscribers. No one would have expected these videos to be so popular a handful of years ago. The sheer volume of free advertising these people give out is an incredible opportunity.
Really Nintendo should be sponsoring these people, not taking away from them. It just shows how stuck in the past Nintendo is. When that cultural inertia dies down, so will Nintendo. They will be relegated to the same realm as Sega and Neo Geo. Some quaint thing that is looked on with nostalgia and disappointment for their refusal to use their vast opportunities.
The NES, Super NES, and Nintendo 64 consoles generally output a nonstandard 240p (NTSC) or 288p (PAL) composite video signal.* The timing doesn't match the official spec but is well within the tolerance of 1980s CRT SDTVs. Some DVD recorders and some USB video capture devices can handle the nonstandard timing; others can't. GameCube and Wii should work with anything. I don't own a Wii U yet.
* One Super NES game and a handful of N64 games are in 480i.
Nintendo's fans aren't just the ones making the videos. There are also millions and millions of fans watching
Being supportive of the streaming players helps to get more people interested in Nintendo properties. (or whichever game they're playing)
This signature is false.
Nintendo platforms had killer exclusives long after the end of the original NES. One was Super Smash Bros. Melee.
output of a game being played != a copy of the game.
The NES PPU takes shortcuts that produce characteristic artifacts in the composite signal. Some games, such as Blaster Master, rely on these artifacts to create more apparent colors than are actually there. Some emulators, such as Nestopia, have an NTSC filter that emulates these artifacts; others don't. Not emulating the artifacts makes your game look like it's being played on a PlayChoice or an emulator.
It's not an infringement to run homebrew games like Thwaite in an emulator. Nor is it an infringement to back up your own cartridges using a cart reader like this for the purpose of playing them in an emulator, so long as you do not distribute the dumps. (Assuming US law, 17 USC 117(a)(1).) But by the logic of the ruling in UMG v. MP3.com, it is an infringement to download a commercial game's ROM image through the Internet even if you own an authentic cartridge.
On the contrary, Nintendo has a long and ignoble history of doing this sort of thing. They've sued or C&Ded customers in the past just for mentioning their games on a blog, when the customer has been somebody who doesn't fit with their image (their was a stripper a few years ago who got threatened with legal action for saying she "liked Metroid"). They're incredibly protective of everything they see as relating to their franchises and characters (despite the fact that Donkey Kong - the game that started it all - borrows from King Kong's imagery so heavily). They're also pretty lawsuit-happy within the industry, having gone after games whose concepts are too close to their own and even hardware manufacturers for putting out controller d-pads too close to their own.
And player-focussed? Don't make me laugh. They're the only manufacturer still making region-locked consoles. They're the only manufacturer ever, so far as I can tell, to have region locked a hand-held. They basically have a paternalist view of the world where their top brass sits around a table and decides which regions deserve which games (and when some of that reasoning comes out, it often sounds, frankly, borderline racist). They're the only manufacturer to link online purchases to console units rather than accounts, making for endless grief for people whose consoles die. Hell, they even had their own run-in with a Red Ring of Death fiasco (albeit less reported), with the Wii-U's launch firmware update and its habit of bricking consoles.
And this is leaving aside more subjective stuff, like their promise of extensive third party support for the Wii-U which they then failed to guarantee except in a tiny number of cases. Oh, and the speculation they're now themselves fuelling that the next Super Smash Brothers will require Skylanders-style "physical DLC" to access all on-disk content (though they still have time to U-Turn on that one).
And yet, as your post demonstrates, they get away with it. I think part of it is because, being pretty much just a gaming company, they have fewer spheres in which to have scandals. They've never had a CD-rootkit fiasco because they don't distribute music and only make games for their own hardware (though they have long been pioneers of restrictive copy protection in that field). They've never had a Windows 8 fiasco because they don't make operating systems (though one can only imagine how locked down and restrictive a hypothetical Nintendo OS would be). But in the gaming world, their policies have been pure poison for decades.
And oddly, this is the other reason they get away with it - direction of travel. When MS comes out at E3 last year and shows that it wants to be really evil (possibly more evil even than Nintendo) there's an outcry that eventually forces the company to back down. Why? Because it was more restrictive than what MS had done previously. When Sony first entered the market, it basically (probably because it wanted to copy what worked) lifted MS's policies on region locks etc. Since then, it's progressively liberalised them. Nintendo, on the other hand, just carries on being as evil as it has always been, so it only rarely gets noticed (region locking the 3DS got it some bad press, I guess).
In short, don't confuse Nintendo's underdog status (which they've reclaimed again after a brief and terrifying flirtation with success with the Wii) and any nostalgia you may feel for its franchises with any kind of ethics on the part of the company. Within its narrow sphere, it is the most restrictive and anti-consumer of the three console manufacturers.
Why would one WANT people to be interested in Nintento's properties, if this is how they're going to treat their fans? The proper course of action here is to say, "Fuck you Nintento," and stop giving them one's business.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
next up, Nike hijacking some freerunners channel ads.
Because you know, if you use Nike shoes all profit belongs to them because they own copyright to the shoe logo. makes perfect sense??
fuck no, no it doesn't. Nintendo should just publish their own playthroughs instead of retroactively trying to hijack shit. what's next, they going to claim rights over late '80s movies that show someone playing smb3?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I've noticed that the Let's Play channels I watch pretty much stopped doing Nintendo games altogether. Whether Nintendo liked it or not, these channels can bring exposure to their games.
I've bought about a dozen games after watching short LPs of them on Two Best Friends Play's channel or their subchannel on Machinima.
When this first started, I heard podcasts or interviews with people from shows like Hey Ash Whatcha Playin', TBFP, etc. where they basically said they weren't planning any Nintendo game based shows until the situation was changed.