It still hurts them. You, and probably Nintendo, are looking at this like it's simply a win/lose state: there are all these videos out there on Youtube of their games, and they can make money off them, if they assert they're theirs. Sure a few will be taken down, but that's no problem because they're all created equal...j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Except they're not. There are dedicated LPers out there who pull in the major viewership numbers, people tune in to watch them specifically, and if they leave, the lion's share of the overall Nintendo viewership will go with them. They are also the people with the largest incentive to pull their videos down, and leave. There will always be some videos out there, but the high traffic ones are likely to go away.
Then you either have never seen an LP, or never seen a decent one.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
I'll try to walk you through this. A game isn't that different from a piece of music. Not a musical performance, the actual piece itself. It has an intended pattern, an intended direction, and it demands things from the performer to make that happen.
At this point the performance, and the LP, becomes more about how good, or how inept the performer is. The primary goal for an LP is to either show a masterful performance, or, far more commonly, show someone completely coming unglued under the challenge.
In most cases the LP ceases to be about the game, and becomes about the player. I've seen two LPs of Dead Space, one by an excellent player, and one by a terrible one. The Excellent player was entertaining, just for the sheer insanity of some of the things they were doing during the game. The terrible one was hilarious as the game lead him into a faux nervous breakdown. It's the same game, the same linear path, with very little opportunity to deviate from it, but the two performances were so different from one another that claiming it's what the developers intended to happen is comical.
There are certainly other LPs out there, Spoiler Warning comes to mind, that are supposed to be about the game itself, usually in some mix of a deconstruction, or an examination of background material. There are some really informative LPs loose on Youtube.
And this is still not even touching speed runs, which are deliberately about breaking the game in the most efficient way possible. Saying that finishing Deus Ex in 45m was just following the script is even more ludicrous than the Dead Space example above.
Finally, nearly any sandbox style game with a procedural element, almost by definition, can't fit what you're describing. If it's Skryim or Terraria, there is no way the developers can predict the exact path the player will follow.
A fee, yes. But, Nintendo isn't asking for a cut and never asked for one, they're asking for all of it.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Which goes back to the whole part about this basically being free advertising for Nintendo, and their desire to dispense with that. I know, I know, you've been saying that some people don't buy games because of LPs and then citing Walking Dead, which is probably a really bad example, but, anyway, the fact is LPs drive sales, and they cost sales, and without hard numbers, all we can say with absolute certainty is, "more people know about Game X if there are two or three high profile channels doing LPs of it, than if no one touches it." With a fairly reasonable inference that if more people know about Game X, then Game X has more potential customers.
I can't remember the last time I looked at a Nintendo Exclusive and said "that actually looks fun"... probably Mario 64 or Metroid Prime... :\j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Of course they are hired by the company to do that, but I couldn't resist pointing out your perpetual double standards of what constitutes effort.
