So Fez creator Phil Fish got into a very interesting discussion with himself on Twitter a few days ago, the ripples of which have still been sparking discussion amongst hobbyists, youtubers, developers, and publishers alike within the game industry.
It started out pretty bluntly, with Fish tweeting the following:
“YouTubers should have to pay out a huge portion of their revenue to the developers from which they steal all their content.”
He continued, laying down his own personal form of law in the wild west of youtubers and long plays:
“[Ad] revenue should be shared with developers. This should be built into YouTube. Anything else is basically piracy.”
He then went on to post a barrage of tweets, further elaborating how he feels about youtubers publishing videos containing games, and how much he feels they are wrong:
- “If you generate money from putting my content on your channel, you owe me money. Simple as that.”
- “If you buy a movie, are you then allowed to stream the entirety of it publicly for people to watch for free? No, because that’s illegal.”
- “Systems are in place to prevent that. But buy Fez, put ALL of it on YouTube, turn on ads, make money from it and that’s TOTALLY FINE.”
- “And the developer should in NO WAY be compensated for their work being freely distributed to the world. Right. Makes sense.”
Later, he tweeted simply “Nevermind,” which was probably a response to the huge amount of people rallying against his stance. It seems like things got a bit too hot for him, as he locked his Twitter account, only to later delete it completely.
We haven’t heard from Fish since this whole debacle, and we probably won’t hear from him for awhile – at least until devs and pubs alike can unanimously decide upon either taking a cut of the let’s play pie, or giving youtubers complete revenue income.
I think the issue stems from this very line drawn in the sand, how lots of indies are saying “Sure, go ahead and monetize videos of my games,” while some larger devs (and even indies like Fish) are saying they want to have their cake and eat it too.
There’s also the aggressive and automatic flagging and taking down of videos (and sometime even trolling by non-copyright owners) via Youtube’s iron fisted content ID system, but I digress.
How do you guys feel about this? Is Fish correct, or at least partially?
