Nintendo Goes To War With YouTubers Right Before New ‘Zelda’ Release

Copyright

from the the-hand-that-feeds-you dept

It’s no secret that Nintendo is extremely draconian when it comes to all things intellectual property concerning its assets. You can simply follow that backlink for a list of tons and tons of posts on Nintendo doing Nintendo things, which mostly amount to shutting down any use of its property, no matter how small, no matter whether fair use applies.

But did you know that Nintendo is not merely draconian when it comes to all things IP, but quite capricious, too? That certainly seems to be the case with Nintendo, on the eve of the release of the Zelda game Tears of the Kingdom, going around and demonitizing a whole bunch of YouTuber content for the Zelda franchise. Including some content that has been around for quite some time.

It started with Eric “PointCrow” Morino, a YouTuber who does speedruns of games. Morino also apparently commissioned a mod for Breath of the Wild to make the game multiplayer and put out some videos of it in action. Then, well…

YouTuber and speedrunner Eric “PointCrow” Morino released a brand new multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on April 4. It basically transforms the hit 2017 Switch game into a modern open-world version of the beloved co-op Zelda spin-off Four Swords Adventures. A couple of days later, Morino says Nintendo hit him with copyright infringement claims that led some of his biggest YouTube videos to be demonetized.

“Incredibly disappointed that Nintendo of America has decided to block my videos on Breath of the Wild,” he tweeted on April 6. “It’s the love for the community and the innovation that we bring to it that has kept it alive & brought new people to love the Zelda series. I hope you reverse your decision soon.” Morino also shared a screencap of several of his YouTube videos, including ones featuring gameplay footage from the multiplayer mod, showing they’d been flagged for copyright issues.

Most publishers don’t bother with this sort of thing. At worst, they don’t see it as worth the trouble to go after streamers who are merely showing off a game’s gameplay. At best, publishers understand that these types of videos actually work to promote and sell the games they feature… and for free! Plenty of folks, myself included, will go hunt down some let’s plays in order to see a game in action before deciding to plunk down the money for it themselves. I can assure you that in 99% of cases, these let’s play videos do not serve as a replacement for enjoying and playing the game yourself.

Nintendo is not most publishers. Still, many people figured it was the use of the mod that landed Morino in Nintendo’s crosshairs.

In response to Morino’s post, several other big content creators chimed in. “Not good for them considering they’re releasing a new game soon and many content creators will popularize it even more and may choose not to create videos around it,” wrote Kittyplays. “Nintendo detected fans having fun and they can’t have that,” wrote LostPause. “This is sad given how much love and effort you given them and botw.”

It turns out that Nintendo, instead of reversing course over the public backlash, has instead decided to double down on its stance and go after even more YouTubers streaming Zelda content. Morino had basically begged Nintendo to rescind the copyright claims on his videos. Instead, they fired off even more.

He now says Nintendo has done the opposite, proceeding to copyright claim over 20 additional videos spanning his entire content making career. While most of them included the word “mod” in the title, at least one contained just vanilla gameplay with commentary. “These takedowns may have started with modded content, but they’ve spiraled into something else entirely,” Morino said in his latest video.

But he is no longer the only one.

On April 13, another Zelda Youtuber, Croton, said 10 of their streams and two of their videos were “nuked” from the platform. “No answers, no context, just a copyright removal,” they tweeted. “And one of these videos has literally nothing to do with mods and was simply a Zelda challenge run.”

Again, it’s important to keep in mind that all of this is happening just as Nintendo is about to release its Tears of the Kingdom game in the Zelda franchise. Doing this is completely tone-deaf. It’s like Nintendo walking into its own marketing department and telling them to stop working, except that marketing department is entirely unpaid and was only working for Nintendo out of love for the company.

Not exactly the smartest plan ahead of a new AAA release!

Filed Under: copyright, let's play, pointcrow, speedrun, youtubers, zelda
Companies: nintendo