Tres rouge.
The root cause is because of the stances organizations took that represent the entertainment mediums.
The MPAA, (movies) RIAA (music), and [NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, FIFA, etc] (sports) organizations along with their international equivalents decided long ago that unauthorized reproduction and broadcast is theft. They choose to pour significant resources into collectively finding and eliminating all rouge broadcasts.
The ESA (games) is the closest thing the videogame medium has to an organized business authority. They have never organized any kind of meaningful outcry against rouge broadcasts a decade ago. This forced game companies against the Let's Play practice to combat the practice on their own. Because of the lack of developer unity against the Let's Play practice for so long, and no Let's Play court case has ever gone to trial, the rouge broadcasts have been able to proliferate into a somewhat legal culture that expects the right to be paid to stream someone else's work.
For perspective, the RIAA generally unifies the actions of 1600+ record labels, where the standard organized music industry response to Content ID is monetize all identified samples. The videogame industry fight against identified samples consists of pretty much Nintendo, Konami, the That Dragon Cancer guy, Atlus, and EA (only in the name of containing exploits). Which leads to..
Yeah you can still do this. You can get away with this for awhile for any medium whenever you adjust the viewing frame, add some junk bezel, adjust the pitch, time stretch, distort the color, and splice small unrelated clips at intervals. These are eventually flagged by youtubers themselves for being unwatchable or by a paid staff searching manually. The music, movie, and sports industries have a large number of paid staff. The videogame industry infringement-search paid staff is generally all run by Nintendo.
In addition to the perception that each playthrough is technically unique, perhaps (graphics-single-minded) companies in the ESA are divided about the eventual widespread misrepresentation of a game's presentation if rigorous Let's Play flagging were ever enforced over time.
I discovered /r/GamesTheMovie eons ago and stopped buying videogames outside the STGs. I am the problemmm!
And yet I maliciously rationalize and don't care because yeah:
Last edited by DJ Incompetent; 01 May 2017 at 10:53 AM.
Tres rouge.
Semi-related, I just saw that some people are trying to make this a thing with video programming.
Riff.tv apparently is just full of people watching shows on netflix and doing "live reactions". They aren't streaming the video, but there's a thumbnail in the corner that shows the timestamp they are on so you can sync up on your own. It's actually kind of neat, you can link your Netflix account and it will play the video for you in the corner, and you can fade the audio between the video and the commentary. There's a chatroom, too. It's Twitch for movies.
I don't know how I feel about this yet. It's cool tech, at least.
Why are you reading this? go to your general settings and uncheck the Show Signatures box already!
I thought this thread might be about suggesting we play iD's Mario 3 PC bootleg.
Anyway, I watched Deadly Premonition LP (skipping the game part) because the gameplay was such ass. But I'd have no problem if this was gone
Last edited by Joust Williams; 26 May 2017 at 04:24 PM.
Great discussion here!
I think things actually should be arbitrated on a game by game basis.
I actually love the way Atlus handled Persona 5 by giving clear and specific guidelines of what you can and can't stream from the game. I have no idea of how well that worked, and if they followed through with enforcing it, but I think it benefits the publisher as well as the audience (to prevent spoilers and such). If you like to watch streams to see if you like a game, you can still watch enough to make that determination. If enough publishers see this as an issue, I could see these kinds of specific rules being standardized, maybe in an ESRB type of way (as DJ Incompetent was suggesting).
I've personally thought "Let's Plays" were stupid, and they probably are for the most part, but I've found that there's a lot of value of being able to experience games that are too hard to find or time consuming to play through. Or maybe there's just a certain part of a game I wanted to check out. For reasons like this, the movie analogy doesn't hold because you can't just skip to specific parts of games. Right now I'm watching a Let's Play of King's Field IV, and can see why it was trashed in reviews when it was released. But having someone play through it and explain what's going on in the game, shows how much depth and brilliant design is in an otherwise cumbersome and unimpressive looking game. Let's Plays have the benefit of shining light on buried gems.
Games usually make the majority of sales during the launch window, or first year. Past that, do Let's Plays do any damage? I have no idea, but I could see it as only beneficial for certain types of games.
Nintendo's a special case. Their titles have really long tails, so it makes sense for them to be so protective of them. But it makes me wonder how they'll change now that they're going so heavy on the eSports angle with Splatoon and ARMs.
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