So, do you remember That Dragon, Cancer? Its devs have just open up about their feelings about Let's Plays on the Internet, and I think they made some pretty interesting points (nothing groundbreaking, but I think they're worth a thread), so I want to share it with you and see your opinions. I'll copy some extracts and give you the actual source so you can read it freely.

"Our studio has not yet seen a single dollar from sales. That Dragon, Cancer was created by a studio of eight, and for many of us it was a full-time effort that involved thousands of hours of work. This huge effort required taking on investment, and we decided to pay off all of our debt as soon as possible. But we underestimated how many people would be satisfied with only watching the game instead of playing it themselves."

They share the general thinking (and my personal thinking) that they shouldn't take advantage of youtubers and other "Let's players" (I know, awful term) work:

"And so yes, Let's Play person, I agree with you, it does suck to have someone else making revenue off your work (...) We feel the Let’s Play culture adds value to this medium. And for games with more expansive or replayable gameplay, it can directly benefit developers. Even knowing that some who streamed our entire game refuse to directly encourage people to support us, we’ve still sat on the streams and talked with streamers and viewers. We’ve watched the playthrough videos and we see the value that this community is adding to our work through sharing themselves. Let’s Play culture is vibrant and creative and really cool.  "

However:

"However, there is a flip side for the developers whose content you build your work on top of. Despite infringing on developers’ copyrights, it can especially benefit those who make competitive or sandbox games.  However, for a short, relatively linear experience like ours, for millions of viewers, Let’s Play recordings of our content satisfy their interest and they never go on to interact with the game in the personal way that we intended for it to be experienced. If you compare the millions of views of the entirety of our game on YouTube to our sales as estimated on SteamSpy, you can hopefully see the disparity.  We have seen many people post our entire game on YouTube with little to no commentary. We’ve seen people decompile our game and post our soundtrack on YouTube. We’ve also seen many, many Let’s Players post entire playthroughs of our game, posting links to all of their own social channels and all of their own merchandising and leaving out a link to our site. (...) All we are asking in return is that you honor our work, the work you build your livelihood on top of, and acknowledge that when you do it, there is a real cost to developers. For us, it costs us the ability to continue to share this game through translation into other languages and bringing it to new platforms, along with starting new projects."

So now they're asking these people to do this:

"We are asking that you return that favor by creating Let’s Play videos that don’t just rebroadcast the entirety of our content with minimal commentary, but instead use portions of our content as a context to share your own stories and start conversations with your viewers."

So, I think they had a point. I'm really surprised that the game didn't sell all that well, because it really has a great number of YT visits, and it was critically succesful. But it kept me thinking about the great impact Let's Plays could have on this "short, story-based" games, with a lot of people don't bother to buy it, and just seeing it complete on YT.

So, sources:

TL,DR: http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/25/11305862/that-dragon-cancer-lets-play

Main source: http://www.thatdragoncancer.com/thatdragoncancer/

Thoughts?

That's a shame. I've heard that it's really good and you never want to hear about a developer not being able to make money on all of their hard work.

You know what, Sold. Buying That Dragon, Cancer on Steam right now. I like this type of game, and the easiest way to help a dev, is to buy their game.

Yeah, it is really a shame. You can tell by playing the game that it's a very, very personal work, and I'm sure that devs have put a lot into it, because of everything that represents. It's not a game for everyone, but the work is really there. 

This basically highlights the flaws some people were pointing out in common argument that LPs advertise and help the game.

TB's thoughts on the matter from a few days back:

Makes sense that story-based games would suffer.

Sure, but it's the first time I hear it coming for an actual developer. And, well, I thought that the game was sucessful based on YT views and word of mouth, but I think it's pretty obvious that LPs actually affected their sales.

I don't really like Total Biscuit (well, sometimes, it depends on the topic), but I'll watch this video when I have free time (busy with homework) and see what are his thoughts about this issue ;)

EDIT: So, I've just watched it and I think he made very valid points. It's really hard to tell if LPs are benefitial or not, and it's more of a case-to-case basis. But I think it's fair, and I'm inclined to say, that when we're talking about this little, story-based games, LPs affect negatively. Again, we don't really know that as a fact, but based on YT views, word of mouth, critical reception... It should have made some revenue. I really have a hard time believing otherwise. I'm not speaking about LPs in general, since I think their impact are more positive than negative, but in this case, I think it's the opposite. Completely agree about ContentID though, but that's another subject (he's really spot on when he separated the subjects, I think that the LP subject is more controversial and hard to discuss).

I really agree. Though LPs can benefit the game and its devs, it can detract if the LP itself becomes a substitute for the experience it's covering, a problem that mostly affects shorter and/or story-based games.

Yep, I think so. Although there's maybe no objective data which can prove that (well, it's impossible to know about if the people who watch YT videos would have bought it if YT didn't exist), I believe that it affects massively to these games.