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.  

no matter what Joe does or what you think of him. Its a dumb policy period.

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.  

Covered this in a long post in the UNITY thread last year; don't feel like repeating myself. It's a stupid policy, especially for someone who could use all the allies the can get.

I also covered the region lock issue, where Iwata famously stated that "it is a feature we have imposed historically", which is a non-reason. This falls under the same category; they're basically doing it because they can but only end up hurting themselves in the process.

As an example, let's say that you never played the original Halo on the xbox but you watched someone play the entire game in a Let's play video, would you say that you played the game or that you experienced the game fully? It's not the same as a movie.

I like that I see you posting as a regular user. Not many of the mods just post on threads in a non-moderator related way.

I never said you get the full experience. I said that one can experience the best parts (which matter to them) of certain games that they intended to buy without buying them and then they can change their opinion about buyign the game. It wasn't like the cutscene was free to make, yet somebody still gets to experience said cutscene free of charge. I experienced the parts of Halo 4 that I wanted to experience - the story, and I didn't have to buy the game. That in my opinion, is partial IP damage on the part of the content distributor (I don't consider piracy theft I consider it property damage, for example.) I don't think people should complain when they can't get away with it. 

To be honest; I haven't been very active in the last year or so, I've worked so much and recently moved away from all friends and family (and to another country) and I really haven't been moderating much lately.

But thanks! I still enjoy the forums after all these years, great community.

To each their own on that. I believe that if someone sees huge portions or mere minutes of game then it's like advertising. Doesn't mean that everyone who sees it will want to buy the game but it does help sales some. If the game is good then those vids should really help sales. Advertisers get paid though. Youtubers are basically the same thing and should be able to make money off of advertising a company's product. Consumers shouldn't pay money to see those advertisments.

Not all advertisement is good though. A lot of developers don't provide demos, for example, because demos can hurt game sales just as much as they can help them. If one's opinion of a game is dependent on the let's player and not the actually quality of the game or Nintendo's personalized advertisement, then there can be unforeseen negative consequences and risks just as much as there can be positive ones. Here's an interesting Extra Credits video about the topic of demos, and I think they can be applied to let's plays as well. 

View on YouTube