The Top 10 Game Industry Disasters of 2013
09. The YouTube DMCA Attack on Gaming
Before all the blame shifts to YouTube, bear in mind that the company would not have launched its very well organized attack on videos that contain game content if some of the publishers and studios had not come to them and declared the issue an issue.
Forgetting for a moment that the Let's Play and Strategy Video WTG, not to mention gamer VLOG and Review Videos serve as free PR for the games -- giving them advertising of a sort that they could never afford to pay for! After all they have thousands of creators all over the world promoting their game titles, you would think that they would be grateful, and takedown notices would be the last thing on their minds, right?
The fact that the vast majority of the content that was being targeted legally qualifies as fair use under the current interpretation of the law considered, when you go after the members of your game's fan base for doing what fans do -- talking about, reviewing, and promoting the games -- well, something is horribly wrong here.
Once we started to dig into this issue it turned out that while the powers that be at YouTube were going after videos with game content in them -- sometimes on their own but usually after a game studio or publisher made an issue of it -- the actual genesis for these efforts turns out to be an element nobody saw coming.The first round of takedown notices had not been generated by the games industry at all! It seems that they originated from the music industry. Why? Well it seems that a lot of games these days license songs from the music industry to use on in-game radio stations and as background noise -- and the music industry did not like it that people -- gamers! -- were filing their game play. Game play whose audio happened to include THEIR licensed products.
Considering the lengths that the music industry watchdogs have gone to in the past is anyone really surprised that they targeted video game videos on YouTube?? We aren't and that is why this disaster of a PR nightmare for the games industry made our list.
DRM should be a crime. Publishers need to realize that ownership is what capitalism is all about. People move, have friends, share with their friends, and PC's and consoles die. Hard drives crash. No one should be punished for having to deal with an already horrible situation, ie: catastrophic HD failure.
DRM also creates more piracy that it stops.
I personally was sad to hear about the loss of THQ.
But thankful that the Warhammer franchise was bought over. For all of their terrible games, their Dawn of War and Space Marine IPs were solid, fantastic games!
Will Sims freeplay be a contender for 2014 given the uproar of their new update? Should be its been bsit and switch. A real time game where sims live 42 days! Disgraceful.
"The fact that the vast majority of the content that was being targeted legally qualifies as fair use under the current interpretation of the law considered"
That's where a lot of people have a misunderstanding about Fair Use. Their vids might be seen as Fair Use but ONLY a court of law can make that decision no one else can. Also Youtube isn't at fault here, they are doing only what the law says. If someone files a copyright claim against a vid Youtube has to take it down or they may face legal action from the content owner.
Youtube has been sued multiple times by companies and other people over copyright infringement. Youtube was actually going to shut down do to all the legal troubles until Google bought them.
I took a gamecube to Iraq as well. Eternal Darkness was the kind of thing that made war seem not so bad.
Considering the Steam OS, I personally think that was a very big announcement from Valve and as you can see, lots of game developers thought the same.
Linux is going to be the future, like it or not.
Great list. On a positive note for us non multiplayers The Last of Us single handedly saved the single player game 2013.
Who cares about THQ. In the long run something else will fill the void. And the Xbox one is hardly a failure as they are still selling strong and making microsoft money. They told us before that it will be a gaming system AND a multimedia system. People just need to understand that.