This is becoming kind of a big deal:
What’s happening is that in the last few years Youtube has exploded as a wonderful medium for game coverage. Plenty of non-professional gamers stream and record game session, they review games, make interviews and so on. And end up making enough money to turn professional and do this as an actual job.
These days dudes such Angry Joe or Total Biscuit CAN move large amount of sales and have a HUGE following because the userbase trusts them.
For me the interesting part is that THIS is especially the evolution of the kind of scene I was participating in from 2004 onward. Having a blog and putting many hours writing down, gathering news, analyzing game design, criticize, propose and so on (I did it full time, but for free). I did all that specifically about MMORPGs and this kind of scene was almost completely ignored by actual game developers, instead of being used as a precious resource. The sorry state of the MMO industry today is due in large part to the blindness of that part of the industry itself since they pissed all over the strong community that was developing at the time.
Now these dudes are doing the same thing, but with more powerful tools. Instead of an unwelcoming wall of text they have videos. They can show right away gameplay and comment on it. Point out flaws and qualities, show what is broken and how to fix it. Guys like Angry Joe and TotalBiscuit not only make damn good and honest reviews, but they do GET game design and understand very well what does and doesn’t work in a game, and why. They do the stuff I was doing, only immensely better, in part because they have more powerful tools in their hands.
This doesn’t have an effect on the userbase, simply. But it is pushing the whole game industry to a new level. Games are being discussed actively, become mainstream. The amount of opinions they produce is something that bleeds out to every game community, to Reddit, to Neogaf and so on. The more the “game genre” becomes “big” the more it evolves and develops. The more people that talk together about all this, the more it becomes “serious”, and not just something that is understood by a small minority of dedicated fans, who “care”.
And yet it’s all flawed when it all depends on one great overlord, in this case Youtube/Google. What happened in these last few days is that Youtube flipped a switch and started matching all sort of content and flag it as copyrighted material. The most affected are, obviously, let’s play videos. Since there’s the idea that footage you have of yourself playing a game still actually belongs to the original developer (which is symptomatic of the trend of interactive cutscenes, instead of actual “games”). But then it also bled out toward EVERYTHING. You make a game review, and it gets flagged as copyrighted material, because the automatic content match found a song playing in the background, or recognized a chunk of copyrighted game trailer. There was a gameplay video from Kingdoms of Amalur, a company that no longer exists, taken down because it matched the song playing during a boss fight. Angry Joe went personally to E3 to make interviews directly with developers, microphone in the hand, interviews taken down for copyright claims again. Consider that NONE OF THIS is the result of an actual deliberate action. It’s simply an automated system with no control whatsoever. If you get one video flagged you can do nothing beside filing a counter claim that Youtube passes to the company that made the claim. If no one is at the other end, the thing goes completely ignored and you lose your content. Which means the system is being actively abused to flag EVERYTHING. There are unknown companies claiming rights to stuff they don’t own and so on. There was even the example of Viacom taking down their own channel because it went through an affiliate that wasn’t recognized.
So in the end there are only lawyers and big corporations left. This isn’t AT ALL about piracy. Piracy is just the excuse for the witch hunt and scattershot strategy. You are always GUILTY, until you prove you aren’t. We are talking about game reviews and “let’s play”, whose only result is produce MORE SALES, MORE PUBLICITY, MORE AWARENESS. Growing the game community as it never grew before. I bought countless games thanks to this, sitting in my Steam list. Steam’s expansion can thank these guys if it’s as big as it is now. There were smaller companies taking down video reviews with bullshit copyright claims simply because the review happened to be negative. Basically, Google in order to please the advertisers has built a system that is being actively abused by the same advertisers, and this is hurting directly EVERYONE involved. And there’s no way to solve any of this because money makes the rules, and those with money and power are usually complete idiots, and, when it comes about games, those that manage the money and lawyers know jack shit about games.
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For the record:
