Stadia Creative Director- Streamers should pay to license games they stream

[DonFerrari]

The Fury said:

So... I'm always in a weird mind about how all this stuff works. The software is actually a licence based system, all of it whether you think it or not. I buy a game, I'm buying a copy of a game on disc or to download, I sub to PS+, Game Pass, whatever, I end those subs I lose those games, because the licence is tied to me paying for the ongoing licence. It's not different to many pieces of software my company uses, we all know how it works, you pay nothing for the software except a licence to use it monthly or yearly.

Now, I make money from that software buy producing a product or service but I'm paying back (or my company is) to the company on a regular basis to use their product (most the time). This is all cool and fine yet iin the terms of gaming, I pay for my copy of the licence which could be attached to a disc or my steam account or whatever. I've paid for the licence to play the game. If I play it on stream, I've paid for it, so I should be able to play it, when I'm playing it I'm advertising it as a product I enjoy and am encouraging others to buy or play it, because I am enjoying it. Companies even know the value of this and will even pay streamers or youtubers to play their games as 'ads' as they know what influence they can have. So a streamer should be able to play that game as much as they want, on stream if they payed for it.

There is however a middle ground to all this. It's not streamers who should be looked at, it's Twitch or whatever platform. Steamers have paid for the licence already, Twitch has not, Twitch makes money from these games and just makes money from them. Twitch is what should be billed, sadly, that means they'll pass those bills onto streamers. However, technically Twitch's product are the streamers, not the games. It's weird.

My only other issue with the situation is that some streamers can make more money from playing a game than a lot of the devs working on the game combined, that to me is weird.

It certainly is possible to make a middle ground be it with Twitch, YT or the streamers... charge it by views (that is also how the youtubers receive) so let's say small channel, less than 1000 views you don't pay anything. But after that after you pay 1 cent for so each so many views. No flat rate so I don't think that would make streamers run away. And that also don't invalidate the possibility of the companies paying for the streamers to show their product.