Now, Nintendo is further tweaking these new YouTube policies, but not in a way that incorporates the feedback they’ve received. Rather, they’ve taken one of the more confusing aspects of the original deal, and just made it explicitly awful.
The problems with Nintendo’s original policy document were myriad, but came down to a few issues in particular. Most prominently, Nintendo seemed to say that if you wanted to register your YouTube channel through their new partnership program, you would be giving them a cut of the revenue of all your videos.
“When you register a channel, you will be eligible to receive a share of advertising revenue from Nintendo for all videos included in that channel, regardless of their content,” the original statement read.
The solution there was to register each video individually if you didn’t want Nintendo essentially owning your entire channel.
Now, Nintendo is altering that part of the policy, either because they wanted to clear up the confusing language, or they simply realized they weren’t actually allowed to monetize non-Nintendo videos on someone’s channel.
But now? The solution is just as bad, if not worse.
“We are only able to register channels that contain game titles specified on the list of supported games,” the new addendum says. “If you have already submitted your channel for registration and it includes video(s) that contain game titles outside of the list of supported games, please remove those videos from your channel within two weeks of the submission date.”
So to be perfectly clear here, upon realizing they couldn’t monetize non-Nintendo videos on someone’s channel, in order to get someone’s YouTube account registered through the Partner program, they have to either delete all non-Nintendo videos from their channel, or they have to form an entirely separate channel, which only contains games from Nintendo’s approved list.
This is utter insanity, and shows just how badly Nintendo misunderstands the entire YouTube scene. This is their attempt at an olive branch after years of draconian policies, but all they’re doing is showing they have no idea how YouTubers operate. No video maker is going to go through and delete every video of every other game they’ve ever talked about in order to please Nintendo. Few are going to bother creating an entirely separate channel that uses only Nintendo’s small list of approved games, which as a reminder, lacks huge titles like Super Smash Bros, Bayonetta, Pokémon and others. While someone like PewDiePie may be able to fashion a Nintendo-only channel and probably get a million subscribers by the end of the day, that isn’t the case for most YouTubers who have to scrape and dig for every new subscriber on their main channel, and won’t be bothered to start an entirely new one. But even the big names in the industry will probably just not even bother with Nintendo, having to jump through all these hoops and then still receive a smaller cut on the video than normal. Why would someone like PewDiePie or TotalBiscuit bother creating an entirely separate channel so they can upload Mario Kart 8 footage and make a smaller percentage on that video than they would playing literally anything else? It’s absurd.
So it’s not clear why this channel registration even exists at all at this point, as the only remotely feasible option is to register videos individually, which many are pointing to as the solution. But that comes with its own set of problems. The revenue cut is smaller (60% to you vs. 70% if your entire channel is registered) and the list of approved games is lacking, as we’ve discussed, but past that, it can take Nintendo days to approve videos for registration, they can shoot them down for Terms of Service violations (can you swear on camera in the Nintendo Partner program? Let’s find out!), and you only get paid on these videos after YouTube pays Nintendo, which can be a lengthy stretch of time.
All of this is idiotic. Sure, Nintendo has the right to do whatever they want with footage of their games, and yes, this is more generous that a blanket ban on all videos or grabbing every cent earned on them. And yet it totally misunderstands the market, and the powerful ally an army of YouTubers can be. Most companies have figured out that Let’s Plays and video reviews are fantastic marketing tools (unless your game is god awful, which Nintendo’s aren’t), and with the Wii U the slowest selling console in the company’s history, they need all the help they can get. There is absolutely no reason to be this stingy over rights issues, and for as smiley and friendly as Nintendo is, they couldn’t be more wrong about this.
Hopefully further changes to Nintendo’s YouTube policies will make things better, not worse, but so far that hasn’t been the trend.
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