YouTube Shutting Down Game Reviewers
 

There's an interesting thing going on over at Youtube these last couple of days. Popular video game channels like the Angry Video Game Nerd, Armake21, ScrewAttack and Game Trailers are getting suspended.

Whether or not you like their videos or not is irrelevant. The fact that all of these popular channels are being shut down is cause for concern.

AVGN had his channel shut down once before, and when he came back he not only changed his name from the Angry Nintendo Nerd, but also only posted brief trailers of his videos to avoid this very thing from happening again.

I'll admit I don't know all the details about what's going on yet, but this is a little disturbing. Like their sense of humor or not, the video channels in question are at least original and creative in some way. And I thought Fair Use came into play for reviews and parody. There's thousands of videos on YT that are just someone playing a game or uploading a full movie in 10 minute increments. That's copyright infringement. But parodies and reviews?

Them getting shut down based on humor doesn't make sense, considering some of the stuff you can find on youtube.

I bet Youtube is getting DMCA takedown notices targeting critical videos.

Google is taking over the world :(

I got a lovely little notice about content violation about 10 minutes after I uploaded an EA video yesterday. I just love the stream of events:

-An EA rep sent me an email promoting a new game and the subsequent link to the trailer in hopes I'll post it to VGT's front page.
-I, in turn, upload the video to Youtube to post on VGT.
-Youtube sends me a takedown notice and a warning from EA about content violation.

Awesome work guys! After a couple emails back and forth, they finally allowed the video to stay, but laid claim to the page for advertising purposes. Yeah, time to look for new video hosting.

Very strange. It's not like gameplay videos are going to stop people from buying the game. "Why play it? I've already watched somebody else playing it!!!"

Christ.

Why are all these places so freakin' clueless.

Here's a tip, PR people...

Upload your OWN footage to your OWN Youtube channel. THEN give journalists the LINK to your channel. Easy.

Don't try and bring logic into this.

It's like NBC's logic.

SNL? Some funny bits here and there. Conan and 30 Rock? Same. But why should these shows get free promotion via clips on YouTube when people should "just tune in, so they see it first hand." :rolleyes:

Similarly, why ruin the surprise of a touchdown when you should just be doing it on your own.

I don't know how much I agree with it, but I totally understand it. It's just about controlling your content. The fear is that if you let other people control even a little you'll have a lot less control in the future. This is one of the reasons NBC fought with Apple over pricing. They want to control the pricing and distribution of their material.

This is also why they started Hulu. They control the content distribution of shows like 30 Rock and SNL now.

Is this a good thing for them? I'm not so sure -- but I think they fear seeing what happened with the music industry... the music industry lost much of the control of their content -- including what price it gets sold for and how it gets sold.

I know. I'm sorry.

I've run into this before with movie trailers. Studio releases movie trailer, but doesn't upload it to YouTube. So after a couple of days someone notices it isn't available on YT, where there are MILLIONS of users, and uploads it. Then the studio swoops in and has the video pulled.

It's free effing press!

I didn't type it out so well, but yeah, what you're saying makes sense.

Some additional insight into what's going on... Take Two seems to be a part of the bannings, and if that's true, I can no longer give a shit if they get sold to EA. Fuck 'em.

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Rea...y--86673.phtml
http://playitbogart.blogspot.com/