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Nuvendil on 04 April 2015
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osed125 said:
Nuvendil said:
osed125 said:

Am I the only one who truly believes youtube doesn't affect sales that much? or if at all?

The only game I can think of that truly became popular thanks to youtube was Minecraft. 

I would like to see some hard evidence that Youtube really increases a game's sales by a significant margin (not including 'official' trailers and such, talking about Lets Play, Reviews, etc etc). Until someone can show me some real data, I will still believe that this 'free advertisement' on Youtube is pure crap made by gamers on the internet (which are the people who watch game youtubers in the first place).

Marketing isn't a "hard evidence" kinda business.  They can only guess at the effects.  The general premise is the more positive exposure the better.  And YouTube brings lots of potential for positive exposure.  Especially with reviewers. But this is beside the point.  Nintendo is still behaving in an unethical way.  Commentary, news coverage, critique, and parody are all explicitly covered under the Fair Use doctrine, meaning Nintendo has no right to flag such content, which they have.  Now it is partly YouTube's fault for having the claim system set up in this way, but that doesn't excuse Nintendo.

For your first point, this youtube 'marketing' is pretty much mute in my opinion. Most (if not all) of the people that are subscribed to Angry Joe and the likes are people like us, game enthusiast who spent a lot of time on gaming websites, new channels like IGN, forums, etc etc. People who watch Angry Joe already know about a game way before his review, and I will bet anything that most people will not take his only opinion to purchase a game or not; most will use a bunch of reviews that most will come from IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, etc.

For your second point, the only shows I watch on Youtube are JonTron, PeanutButterGamer, ProJared and all those guys that come from NormalBoots; some of them do reviews or short reviews of plenty of Nintendo games, and I never heard any of them complaining about Nintendo's policies. So I think the answer is obvious, Nintendo asks for some cash (and its their content so its fair), and people like Angry Joe do not want to share any of their money so Nintendo takes it away. These other guys I mentioned seem to have no problem with Nintendo's policies, so in the end I think is just about the money.  

I get what you are saying about redundancy, I was just pointing out that hard numbers are impossible to get with marketing.

However, no it is not fair for them to ask for cash for using their content in anything that counts as fair use.  I'm a writer.  Do I get to take a cut from a literary critic if he sites my work and quotes my work in a published literary analysis paper?  Or do I get a cut from a book reviewer if he extensively quotes my work for the sake of the review?  No I do not, because those uses are covered under fair use doctrine.  I have no authority whatsoever to take a single penny from them; their reviews, critique, analysis, and even parody are theirs alone.

Also, I've been following this for a while and ProJared explained how he gets by with it.  Basically, they have figured out what it is the bot flags and they use that to skirt the flagging system.  They don't pay Nintendo, unless things have changed in the last month or so.  But that's not an excuse for Nintendo.  If they want to have strict flagging settings that's their business but they must respond promptly and reasonably to reports of reviews, commentary, news, or parody being flagged and act in accordance with international copyright law and specifically the fair use doctrine for US content creators.  They don't do this, and that is unethical.