The reality is these youtubers do it as a career.  If they can't monetize a video then they dont have a career.  If someone uploads a song to youtube fair enough,  but all the big publishers are smart enough to allow it bar capon. Call of duty and gta thrive off the free exposure.  EA paid lots of big cod youtubers to come play bf4 and upload early gameplay to their channels. Nintendo are stuck in the 90's. If they were smart they would be paying big money for people like pewdiepie to play their best games. His the last of us walkthrough did wonders for that game.  He made games like flappy bird and slender man massive hits. He's just one big example. Nintendo are becoming super irrelevant with all the young gamers who watch loads of youtube. 

Well... Youtube as well has a lot of sites have royalty free music that these youtubers can use that will never be taken down or be monetized. Cause at the end of the day, these youtubers are smooching off of someone elses work... They essentially take someone elses work and then add their own personality and make money off of it which is fine but if a Company wants to protect their work against these things, they should have every right to because it is these companies that created the content that the youtubers are smooching off of, not the otherway around (excluding reviews and first impressions obviously since they are pretty short)... And the reason why games like Flappy Bird and Slender Man are hits is because they are either cheap or are free. There have been many youtubers with large subscribers that recommended games like Bayonetta 2 which are $60 games but has done fuck all really.

Reviews/First Impressions are fine imo and if they get taken down or copyright claimed, thats terrible but for "Lets plays," yea no. They are showing either the whole entire game or the parts that people actually care about and want to see so if a company does a claim on it, they have every right to do so. And I really dont think "Lets Plays" are "free advertising" because they show virtually every important part of the game whereas an ad only shows enough to make you want to buy the game and experience the rest. (with the exception of esports)

Yet Nintendo sent Miyamoto himself to famous youtube channels like Ijustine and Smosh games to play games like Mario Kart 8. That's a lot better than some stupid let's play. You don't deserve money for just playing a game. 

Jizz_Beard_thePirate I only read the first part. Look they have every right but they will continue to decline in popularity while pc, xbox and playstation games thrive. It's their loss and the loss of nintendo fans who would enjoy a massive increase in youtubers playing their favourite games.

That sucks. Wii U needs all the positive attention it can get. Like others, I wonder why GameXplain and other channels upload their video just fine. I'm pretty sure GameXplain makes money off of their video as well.

Honestly, I highly doubt that youtube affects the outcome of games that much... Look at Bayonetta 2 vs Asscreed Unity as an example. Many youtubers recommended Bayonetta 2 but it sold terribly where as virtually all youtubers said Asscreed Unity is a terrible game yet it sold 5+ million...

Edit: I am not saying Bayonetta 2 should sell as much as Asscreed but the sales of that game is just aweful vs the sales of a broken game is veryyyy high

You're comparing a niche game on the worst selling next gen hardware to a massive selling franchise on the biggest platforms.  But yes youtuber had a massive effect. If the game was good and universally approved those youtubers would have gained it way more sales. Instead they weakened it's sales and deservedly so. Most ninty exclusives are good so that's not a problem nintendo would have dealt with a lot up to this point.  

But the bottom line is youtubers affect sales of games they like big or small.  And if they play a big game and have legit reasons to hate it,  the sales will be damaged. 

How did they weaken the sales of Asscreed Unity if it sold more than Black Flag on the respective platform while being a broken/unplayable game with updates that broke it even more? The game is broken and youtubers like TB made a video as to why he wasn't even going to play it yet a broken game managed to outsell its previous itteration on the same platform? So yea, no... Youtubers influence on expensive games aren't very significant at all

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Lets Plays. Square Enix don't care if you upload lets plays as long as you're actually showing gameplay and they're fine with music in the video as well. I know this because people upload FFXIV stuff all the time.

People need to understand that a video game is an interactive media. You're not playing the video game if all you're doing is just watching it.

Nintendo being the backward-mentality company they have always been. Angry Joe could actually give the Wii U a slight boost in popularity but instead Nintendo pull this. I don't feel sorry for their bad Wii U sales as they have been like this for decades. Sticking with cartridges when CD's gave huge storage capacity improvements, the mini-DVD format for GCN which resulted in gimped ports because they could only hold 1/3 of the data of DVD, then the Wii's inability to display in full HD and finally region locking the Wii U and all 3DS models even though Sony done away with region locking back in 2006...