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

The Fury said:
IcaroRibeiro said:

Isn't this the essence of capitalism? The shareholders who invested in gaming companies who never put a hand on a game code are profiting much more from games than the dev teams as well 

For the big games sure, many smaller games with fewer devs, story driven potentially by small studios reply on people buying the game. But this isn't just some board members or the owners of a company making month on their product and then paying employees for their work (it can come with bonuses for completing work and such alike or profits are even shared based on the company). It's streamers or content creators making money from someone else's work. It's why the debate of "Let's Plays" came up a little while ago and it's why if people on Twitch did a 'let's watch such and such a film together' something like that, they'd no doubt get shut down, banned or DMCA'ed. The game industry essentially let's people stream games because they know the benefits in the end but they also have the complete legal right (if they wanted) to one day just say "No, these are our games you are making money from, you can't stream them." and suddenly, no more Twitch.

Streamers are creating value for their products, just like a marketing teams works to create the same value even though they don't code themselves 

Nowadays movies can have higher budgets for marketing and promotion than for production itself, because movies depends heavily on traditional expensive channels such as TVs, newspapers and ads 

Gaming industry is actually blessed to have streamers working for them for free, and making their OWN money, instead of spending gazillions of dollars a year on paid advertising

No wonder why gaming industry profit margins are much bigger  than box office industry 



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Strictly speaking he is right though.People pay for music, movies, tv showed etc either via a monthly subscription or on disc. If you try to put any of this stuff even though you paid for it on YouTube it will either end somewhere between copyright strike that leads to a ban or just a warning.If that logic applies to other forms of entertainment it should apply to video games.Now look at a bit of history on the other forms of entertainment. In the past a lot was played on "free to air" by various stations (before we got charged for on demand access lol). That is how the popularity grew by people hearing it for free and then people if they liked it went out and bought it.Now the free to air stations radio or tv has to pay licensing fee for this content. They made their money from advertisers in return they delivered the content for free to end users.Now streaming could be treated the same way. Youtube or Twitch pay publishers a fee to allow their games to be streamed. They pump them full of ads make their money as well as pay the streamer something, effectively like pay a employee for working.



 

 

Cobretti2 said:
Strictly speaking he is right though.People pay for music, movies, tv showed etc either via a monthly subscription or on disc. If you try to put any of this stuff even though you paid for it on YouTube it will either end somewhere between copyright strike that leads to a ban or just a warning.If that logic applies to other forms of entertainment it should apply to video games.Now look at a bit of history on the other forms of entertainment. In the past a lot was played on "free to air" by various stations (before we got charged for on demand access lol). That is how the popularity grew by people hearing it for free and then people if they liked it went out and bought it.Now the free to air stations radio or tv has to pay licensing fee for this content. They made their money from advertisers in return they delivered the content for free to end users.Now streaming could be treated the same way. Youtube or Twitch pay publishers a fee to allow their games to be streamed. They pump them full of ads make their money as well as pay the streamer something, effectively like pay a employee for working.

This will destroy most youtubers and streamers except the ones who are already big enough to profit and won't bother to pay that fee, but its basically restrict the market of future streamers 

I never understand the point of the predatory obligation that everything must be paid. Music industry made the decision of paying performance rights because they slowly become desperate their profits were becoming smaller and smaller, and also advertising and background music was rarely bringing ang value to music, as people rarely buy albums because of a song they listened to it in a TV show

But streamers are another thing, their content is specific made around the game. They work in the same way as press media who watches the movies on premiers. Many of them are invested and watch for free before everyone else. Why? Because the reviews bring A LOT of value to box office performance

You can question the fact journalists don't stream the movie fully, but that's not that matter. The matter is they are not exploiting a movie or song popularity to make money, but contributing (positively or negatively) for that product commercial performance 



IcaroRibeiro said:
Cobretti2 said:
Strictly speaking he is right though.People pay for music, movies, tv showed etc either via a monthly subscription or on disc. If you try to put any of this stuff even though you paid for it on YouTube it will either end somewhere between copyright strike that leads to a ban or just a warning.If that logic applies to other forms of entertainment it should apply to video games.Now look at a bit of history on the other forms of entertainment. In the past a lot was played on "free to air" by various stations (before we got charged for on demand access lol). That is how the popularity grew by people hearing it for free and then people if they liked it went out and bought it.Now the free to air stations radio or tv has to pay licensing fee for this content. They made their money from advertisers in return they delivered the content for free to end users.Now streaming could be treated the same way. Youtube or Twitch pay publishers a fee to allow their games to be streamed. They pump them full of ads make their money as well as pay the streamer something, effectively like pay a employee for working.

This will destroy most youtubers and streamers except the ones who are already big enough to profit and won't bother to pay that fee, but its basically restrict the market of future streamers 

I never understand the point of the predatory obligation that everything must be paid. Music industry made the decision of paying performance rights because they slowly become desperate their profits were becoming smaller and smaller, and also advertising and background music was rarely bringing ang value to music, as people rarely buy albums because of a song they listened to it in a TV show

But streamers are another thing, their content is specific made around the game. They work in the same way as press media who watches the movies on premiers. Many of them are invested and watch for free before everyone else. Why? Because the reviews bring A LOT of value to box office performance

You can question the fact journalists don't stream the movie fully, but that's not that matter. The matter is they are not exploiting a movie or song popularity to make money, but contributing (positively or negatively) for that product commercial performance 

Agree with you. I never said I agree with him that the content creators should pay as they already purchased the game. I think the platform holders could do it if there is a middle ground to be made with some of the bigger publishers as without content streamers those platform holders die and they get no ad revenue so it is to the benefit of the platform holder to keep people using their service.

the other option is to boycott those publishers and hope the change their mind and realise it is free marketing for them.