The YouTube Let's Play Crackdown

Do you remember a long long time ago, back when this thing was still in its infancy and the donation count was barely above £50 that I started making game play videos?  If you don't, it was 3 Dirty Dwarves on the Saturn and you are only a few clicks from being able to watch it from the links in the sidebar.

Now I'm obviously not the only person who does this, there are literally thousands of people doing game play commentary videos and while I'm in it to try and entertain you (probably failing) and convince you to donate a little bit to a charity, there are a lot of people who do it for self profit.

Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to be paid for these kind of videos but when all your really doing is just sitting on your ass and playing a game, it's kind of difficult to understand why someone would EXPECT to be paid for that, but that's just me.

Anyway, this "crackdown" I'm talking about is basically YouTube being a lot stricter with it's copyright stuff.  If you have a video that contains copyrighted material, then they flag it.  If you acknowledge the third party content it puts ads on your video and the money goes to that third party, and if you dispute it and win, the ad revenue goes to you.

This tightening up of what can and cannot be monetised is a problem for some people because for a very lucky few, this is how they make a living, although with these changes there is a chance that they won't be able to sustain that anymore.  I don't really see the problem because simply playing a game and talking over it is not the kind of thing that deserves payment really.  I would sit in a room with people and talk to them while I played games all the time at university but no one was showering me in money.

It's not like YouTube is taking the content down, we aren't see a death of the "Let's Play" here, but what we are having to deal with is a reality where people can't milk game play videos for a quick buck.  Still though, it's not all bad because maybe these people can you know....get a job or something...I dunno, maybe I'm just crazy.

This doesn't really affect me in the slightest because I don't monetise my videos and I'm not all that popular.  So if Sega want to put ads on my Panzer Dragoon videos or whatever to earn a few pennies, then fine with me, go for it.  I have a pretty decent job, I'm not going to cry over losing a few YouTube bucks. 

Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's not THAT big of a deal.  If your idea of having a stable income was by producing game play videos with commentary then I think maybe you need to have a long hard think about yourself.