TOASTER_TEAM'S PROFILE

Liberty, I suggest reading the dev of That Dragon Cancer position on this. It shows you the other side of the medal and I'll do my best to quote them in my reply.

Toaster, they shared the money when they bought the thing. Dunno about you, but paying $60 for a game is more than enough in my books for me to LP the shit out of for the whole 10c (if that) I make from it.

I understand you could feel that way. I'd rather if we speak about this as a general phenomenon as opposed to you personally though. This isn't really about your own LP but rather about the phenomenon in general. Approaching an issue with a single anecdotal argument doesn't reveals a whole lot about the situation globally.

People in the comments of their blog have a similar reasoning:

Victor
If I buy the game, everyone involved in making it already got paid.

If I decide to do a Let's Play and I make money because people like my content, that doesn't mean you get more money.

I already payed you for the game; now that you figured out that people are seeing what they get before they buy it, you are calling foul?

GameStop doesn't have to give money to developers for selling games second hand, and you shouldn't get more money from someone because people on youtube like watching people play your game.

You already got paid.

Fuck you.

TDC:

However, for a short, relatively linear experience like ours, for millions of viewers, Let’s Play recordings of our content satisfy their interest and they never go on to interact with the game in the personal way that we intended for it to be experienced. If you compare the millions of views of the entirety of our game on YouTube to our sales as estimated on SteamSpy, you can hopefully see the disparity.

And that's the problem for some game dev here. If a LP provides the full content of the game, some people won't be buying the game. This is turn means less sales for the game. They continue:

TDC:

All we are asking in return is that you honor our work, the work you build your livelihood on top of, and acknowledge that when you do it, there is a real cost to developers. For us, it costs us the ability to continue to share this game through translation into other languages and bringing it to new platforms, along with starting new projects.

To wrap it up, I agree with the following comment:

Maybe there should be a leash on streamers and lp's limiting the amount of content they're allowed to show off.
The gaming industry is VERY generous in that regard compared to lets say the movie industry.
I'm actually surprised they´ve let it go as far as letting people make money off of their products by showing entire games from start to finish without any restrictions at all.
Where do you draw the line between free publicity and piracy.

As for the idea being ridiculous, forward it to Nintendo, I read it on their website:

https://r.ncp.nintendo.net/guide/

Sated brings a good point.

I actually think it'd be fair that games that are LPed should get a portion of the income on the LP videos. At first I was ambivalent about Nintendo's position about LPs but it makes more sense to me now.

I'm really frustrated because, personal thoughts and feelings aside, I get where everyone on both sides of this argument is coming from. Uploading a playthrough in its entirety can discourage people from buying the full game, especially if it's a silent LP of a very linear game.

Uploading a LP of an adventure game (point n' click style) removes the need to buy the game at all in the first place. You might argue the dev should provide games that offer one than one viable route of course.

I don't like the idea of people using "Fair Use" as an excuse to make money without sharing that money with product they are using.

Well, as I've said before, I'd suggest my game but it's not something you could dedicate a lot of time too because it's short, 5 minutes or 10 at the very most (likely to be 5 though).

Good initiative. I hope you'll cover more obscure game which don't currently have coverage. NMS has already been covered to death on youtube for example.

As you haven't created a dedicated thread, I'll go ahead and post it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygtdbgdd4injuz6/Super%20Toaster%200.038.2.zip?dl=0

The reason why I put it here is because a lot of changes actually came following your video and the feedback you provided.

I think it'd be nice if you could sticky a thread for those feedback videos. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to get comments about their games.

This looks fantastic.