After a three day event to show off new games for Stadia, along with three special demos now live you would think Google was having a good time. Unfortunately, one developer derailed it all.
For a quick recap of the Stadia event you can see day 1 here with a PAC-MAN Mega Tunnel Battle demo, day 2 here with the HUMANKIND demo and as for day 3: you can now play a free demo of the upcoming Immortals Fenyx Rising free, a new exclusive 'First on Stadia' title Young Souls was announced and the strategy game Phoenix Point is coming to Stadia in 2021. Additionally, Stadia's invite system is expanding so that if you do invite a friend to Stadia, that friend will get two months of Stadia Pro free and if continued after the free months you then get a month free too. See the Stadia community post for all the info on that.
So that all sounds pretty reasonable, some nice games coming to Google's Linux-powered streaming service Stadia. Where did it go wrong then? Well, Google are currently enjoying a serious round of bad press and Stadia ended up trending all across Twitter, and not for positive reasons.
The problem was Alex Hutchinson, who according to their Twitter bio was the "Creative Director for Google Stadia" that tweeted out these thoughts:
Streamers worried about getting their content pulled because they used music they didn't pay for should be more worried by the fact that they're streaming games they didn't pay for as well. It's all gone as soon as publishers decide to enforce it.
As a bit of context here, Twitch has caused a lot of issues lately due to DMCA take-downs due to copyrighted music. You can see an overview on The Verge.
Hutchinson followed that tweet with:
The real truth is the streamers should be paying the developers and publishers of the games they stream. They should be buying a license like any real business and paying for the content they use.
Hutchinson doubled down on these thoughts in another follow up tweet:
Amazing to me that people are upset at someone saying that the creators of content should be allowed to make some of the money from other people using their content for profit.
Not exactly a good look, coming from a person who works for a currently not exactly popular service streaming games. Even worse to post these up with a Twitter bio written like it was, doing more damage than intended to Stadia. However, Hutchinson is not the Creative Director of Stadia as their profile originally said. They actually worked for Typhoon Studios, which Google acquired and then became part of Stadia Games and Entertainment. So Hutchinson works for a smaller game studio that Google happens to now own to make games for Stadia. Hutchinson has since changed their Twitter bio to reflect that more clearly.
The problem though, is that Hutchinson's comments have been widely ridiculed and it caused Stadia to enjoy thousands of angry gamers, developers and publishers all calling out the comments. The original Twitter post has been quote-tweeted (where people quote it and make a direct comment above it) over four thousand times.
It's an easy argument to deconstruct for how ridiculous it is too. Showing off a game is nothing like playing music, or a movie. It's not static content, it's transformed by the person playing it and it's free advertising for the developer and publisher. You need only look at some of the most popular PC games around to see how livestreaming has caused massive surges in people buying those games like Among Us (source):
Care to guess when livestreamers picked it up? As another very quick example, here's what happened to Freehold Games with their roguelike Caves of Qud when a single video was done on it, to be clear this is their "whole sales history" (source):
There's plenty of other examples of this but you get the idea. There's a reason why so many developers have blanket statements up approving the use of their games in videos. Most understand it's important, and plenty directly pay streamers to take a look at their game. When talking about huge games from big publishers, most developers involved likely never see a penny from the games doing well anyway - only the people at the top do, which makes it even more ridiculous to want to see more money from people showing it off.
What Hutchinson said doesn't even match up with how Google are working with Stadia either. Google are building in streaming features to Stadia, gave out early access to livestreamers to show off Stadia and more. Google aren't dumb and they've distanced themselves very clearly from Hutchinson in a statement to 9to5Google:
The recent tweets by Alex Hutchinson, creative director at the Montreal Studio of Stadia Games and Entertainment, do not reflect those of Stadia, YouTube or Google.
As someone who personally purchased the Stadia Founders Edition, I have been watching in horror.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Streaming is advertising.
Now, I'm not suggesting that publishers should be paying streamers either, since the latter also benefits from the audience “draw” of a big title, but the idea that it should be vice-versa is absurd. (As, in my opinion, are music royalties, but that ship sailed decades ago.)
Now, I'm not suggesting that publishers should be paying streamers either, since the latter also benefits from the audience “draw” of a big title, but the idea that it should be vice-versa is absurd. (As, in my opinion, are music royalties, but that ship sailed decades ago.)
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Quoting: gabberI know it's almost like Stadia is not good for Linux on the desktop.I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at here. If you mean Stadia is bad for Linux on the desktop, it's the wrong way to look at it. Stadia doesn't mean anything really for any current system, since it works across pretty much any existing system. So it's not "good" for Linux on the desktop in the same way it's not "good" for Windows, macOS, Android, Chromecast or anything else.
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orochi_kyo Oct 23, 2020
Quoting: X6205Honestly, i am suprised that all those gameplay/walkthrough videos are not ilegal. How many people decide to watch gameplay instead of pay for the game and streamer got money from it. WTF? This cannot in any way benefit the publisher/developer. YT and others should at least demonetize these types of videos if not remove them completelly. It's like uploading full a movie. But then.. i call YouTube the biggest warez source :) All those full lenght movies uploaed by random people, full lenght movie/game sountracks or other music albums. And the same appliest for full gameplay (not short reviews).
IMO YouTube deserves shutdown for years of tolerating ilegal content. But i guess.. DMCA and others are scared of giants like Google. It's easier to bully average joe for downloading movie torrent.
People like you loves to play the devil's advocate, coming with this ridiculous point of view, which has no proof or whatsoever.
Among Us came out in 2018-2019 and it wasnt popular at all, it was another abandonware gathering dust in Steam and Appstore, suddenly some streamers started to play these "full lenght movies" you talk about and the game is now one of the most popular games right now with 300k, if developers are doing nothing against streaming, even most of them are happy for the free publicity they are getting, who are you to complain about it?
Please if you are a developer, please retire, become a doctor, or something else.
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You know guys for legal topics regarding gaming and entertainment in general there is this (imho very) interesting channel on youtube where an actual and competent US lawyer discuss and explains topics like this. At least for me it was enlightening regarding a lot of US legal disputes regarding videogame topics (like Epic vs Apple). I'd wish there was something like this for IT legal matters in general outside pure entertainment.
Anyway regarding this subject he explains how there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty from Google and publishers in general. Alex Hutchinson is correct when he says streamers don't have the rights to do what they do. And that they are the total mercy of publishers. The fact that publishers (so far) always decided to not enforce the terms of use they themselves conceived and imposed to their users (including streamers) doesn't change that a streamer today has 0 power to defend his job should a publisher decide that it don't like him anymore. The whole point of EULAs is that they can (eventually?) be enforced, that's why people take the hassle to write them.
There would be a healthier and more honest relationship between streamers and publishers if EULAs explicitly allowed for streaming.
Anyway regarding this subject he explains how there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty from Google and publishers in general. Alex Hutchinson is correct when he says streamers don't have the rights to do what they do. And that they are the total mercy of publishers. The fact that publishers (so far) always decided to not enforce the terms of use they themselves conceived and imposed to their users (including streamers) doesn't change that a streamer today has 0 power to defend his job should a publisher decide that it don't like him anymore. The whole point of EULAs is that they can (eventually?) be enforced, that's why people take the hassle to write them.
There would be a healthier and more honest relationship between streamers and publishers if EULAs explicitly allowed for streaming.
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ObsidianBlk Oct 23, 2020
Quoting: MalYou know guys for legal topics regarding gaming and entertainment in general there is this (imho very) interesting channel on youtube where an actual and competent US lawyer discuss and explains topics like this. At least for me it was enlightening regarding a lot of US legal disputes regarding videogame topics (like Epic vs Apple). I'd wish there was something like this for IT legal matters in general outside pure entertainment.
Anyway regarding this subject he explains how there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty from Google and publishers in general. Alex Hutchinson is correct when he says streamers don't have the rights to do what they do. And that they are the total mercy of publishers. The fact that publishers (so far) always decided to not enforce the terms of use they themselves conceived and imposed to their users (including streamers) doesn't change that a streamer today has 0 power to defend his job should a publisher decide that it don't like him anymore. The whole point of EULAs is that they can (eventually?) be enforced, that's why people take the hassle to write them.
There would be a healthier and more honest relationship between streamers and publishers if EULAs explicitly allowed for streaming.
I'm stating up front, I did not watch the video you linked, nor am I a lawyer, that said...
I don't think it's nearly as cut and dry as "streamers don't have the rights to do what they do". Even for media such as movies and books and even music, fair use laws allow for parody, criticism, review, and the ability to display segments of that work in the process, as long as the work is "transformative" in nature. On that notion, most streamers transform the game their are playing by the sheer fact they, the streamer, are interacting with it. Their narration is their performance overlapped with the backdrop of the game. The ultimate outcome is a transformed work.
In regards to EULAs... their enforceability is... questionable, and random ( EULA Wiki, Enforceability ). Some courts uphold them. Some courts have not upheld them. In general it boils down to the specific "infringement" and how it's worded. In fact, reading beyond the section about enforceability, it seems the question over how strong a EULA is has been mocked WITHIN EULAs... seriously, how enforceable is a EULA that bothers to put in a provision about giving up your soul to the company, even if it was added in jest?
I'm not saying basing a career on streaming games is a stable choice, but I think streamers have more ground to stand on than you make it sound. They're not "quite" at the whim of developers/publishers (I say this in that, realistically, if a dev/pub came after a streamer in a legal fight, the streamer would more or less back down due more to financial reasons than true legal ones. If, somehow, you has a legal fight where both the dev/pub AND the streamer were on the same financial footing, I definitely feel the streamer would have some good footing to fight from.)
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Google: Makes their money by using the content produced by the entire internet; has not shown signs of being big on sharing with the content creators.
Also Google:
Uh huh. And when you consider that in the specific instance, the streamers could make a serious case for the idea that the publishers should be paying them for the advertising, well, good lord.
(this is my before-reading-the-discussion take)
Also Google:
QuoteAmazing to me that people are upset at someone saying that the creators of content should be allowed to make some of the money from other people using their content for profit.
Uh huh. And when you consider that in the specific instance, the streamers could make a serious case for the idea that the publishers should be paying them for the advertising, well, good lord.
(this is my before-reading-the-discussion take)
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Quoting: LinasI am not sure I understand it correctly. Is he implying that the streamers did not pay for the game they are streaming? As in piracy? Or does he want people to pay extra to be able to stream?In terms of practicality it's moronic (sure, throw away all that free publicity the streamers are handing you!), but legally he's on fairly solid ground. Streamers are publishing streams of the game being played, the game is copyrighted, so it's arguably like you buy the DVD of a movie and then post it up on Youtube. Their possession of the game is perfectly legal, their broadcasting of it is not.
Of course there's an exception for, for instance, music sampling, parody and such. One might argue that since it's not just a movie recording but in fact new content is being created by the act of playing the game, arguably differently from the play of anyone else (even before you start adding in the voice over with reactions and other bits of creation by the streamers themselves), that should also be an exception. Dunno how that would play in court though.
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Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)So what is that he's not just some random dude, he's in a position to potentially do something about it. If some random person tweeted that, say, you shouldn't be afraid of the Coronavirus, that wouldn't be a huge deal. But what if, and I know this is a ludicrous example, the president of the United States was saying that kind of thing? It could lead to mass death.
Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?
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MisterPaytwick Oct 23, 2020
Quoting: GamewizardOn the Caves of Qud spike all I have to say is "hey, hey, people". Seriously that man can cause massive spikes in sales it's not the first time he's caused a spike like that for a game won't be the last.
Another game for people that don't know about Sseth's shenanigan is Synthethik, to the point the devs even put a blog update after only fixing bugs for a while titled "Hey Hey People". But Underrail, Starsector, hell pull up Sseth's youtube and just do them one by one, until it's some even weirder things like Evenicle, it's likely it's a massive bump in the sales. With Mandalore too, like W40K Mechanicus (a W40K that didn't sold a big chunk to the W40K heads right off the bat was a bad omen), and Brigador (tho it's a joint venture here).
Quoting: X6205Honestly, i am suprised that all those gameplay/walkthrough videos are not ilegal. How many people decide to watch gameplay instead of pay for the game and streamer got money from it. WTF? This cannot in any way benefit the publisher/developer.
We have been there, Twitter and Youtube already had a meltdown about it a few years ago.
It has been understood that most people watch the streamer / content creator and may actually buy more if they don't feel coerced by the publishers behaviour.
Oh talking about "It's illegal", there is a laissezfaire.
The whole thing already blow up in 2017 (wasn't it PewDiePie saying so slur on PUBG? I believe it is, but don't quote me on that) and everybody, the publishers, the devs, youtube, and the players don't want anybody putting their fingers in that jam.
Because the publishers will earn bad rep, the devs will earn bad rep, youtube will lose money and the players want to believe the devs and publishers are close friends or close enough because they also do video games.
And if we have to talk about that as being bad, let's hop off the whole game industry as a topic train. Things are only going to be nastier because this industry has a strong case of bloated and inflated business and yet the pus never burst out of it.
Quoting: X6205DMCA and others are scared of giants like Google.
Implying Google didn't A) automatised it and B) actually think it's good for business, as they are put off the naughty list, but taking content out more often than note result in people putting back that content, sometimes several times.
Quoting: Purple Library Guybut legally he's on fairly solid ground.
It's likely a bit more complicated here, despite DMCA and the guy being on fairly solid ground. 2017 event I point at, and previous occurrences (nintendo going way harder than usual on Fan games on youtube), and all muddied quite a bit the waters: not only it's uneven (basic statments from Bethesda or CDProjekt RED for example to explicitly allow them on their website against people less fond of it), but also because a lot of the abuse against the lack of pushing the copyright on most cases may make the whole thing hard to apply in court (DMCA is not a court action, it's a claim that can be contested, if it is, it may actually end in court)
Last edited by MisterPaytwick on 23 October 2020 at 9:40 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Oct 24, 2020
Just wanted to add this absurdity to the discussion;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEyvoqD5pZU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEyvoqD5pZU
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Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: minfaerBtw, the article confuses me. It sounds like Hutchinson tweeted this by himself, but then keeps using 'they' as if it was his studio's (or some groups) stance. Which is it?Hutchinson did tweet directly, not from a studio account. Perhaps you're tripping up on singular they? Don't know, hard to tell, as you didn't point out the parts confusing you. When talking about a person, using "they" is just pretty normal here.
Thanks for claryfing, that was indeed what tripped me up. Non-native speaker here
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Quoting: dubigrasuYep, more ammunition (as if it wasn't enough already) for Stadia detractors, I can see them buzzing with excitement for this new opportunity.Equally so for Stadia community. I've seen so very few if any posts on Stadia reddit about implication Stadia can have for local play. There is plenty circle jerk too in there and misinformation. Like how if you got a great connection Stadia will be good and no waiting, but the fact that a great connection would also significantly reduce the waiting period for local installation too. Or fact consoles have a "update in rest mode" function, which many consoles owners have not turned on. Then a Stadia supporter posts a picture of "X Download" for console and uses that to talk about how great Stadia is.
If Stadia community wants everyone on board they should strive to preserve peoples wishes; that is local play being an option. It does not mean Google needs to provide local releases, but their Stadia business should in no way affect local play on other platforms. But I bet you Google would not listen to such request. So for gamers you are either Stadia or not. More dividing of gamers. We had console and PC, now we have Stadia too.
Last edited by Linuxwarper on 24 October 2020 at 11:42 am UTC
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Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)
Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?
My thoughts exactly. Everyone needs to calm down.
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Quoting: jo3fisI haven't actually noticed anyone foaming at the mouth. You want everyone stoned out on laudanum or what?Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)
Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?
My thoughts exactly. Everyone needs to calm down.
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wvstolzing Oct 25, 2020
I'm fairly calm re: the streaming; but the following is actual footage of me since hearing about youtube-dl: https://youtu.be/l91g5BmipVE
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: jo3fisI haven't actually noticed anyone foaming at the mouth. You want everyone stoned out on laudanum or what?Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)
Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?
My thoughts exactly. Everyone needs to calm down.
Well that would be a welcome improvement for a lot of people 🤣
How can we deploy this on a mass scale?
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Quoting: KithopConsidering how many games have lengthy cutscenes (i.e. movies), I'm tempted to say that in some ways, this guy's not wrong. For certain games, the 'stream' is basically just the streamer watching and commenting on these lengthy cutscenes. Probably stuff like the interactive storybook stuff Telltale was known for, or extremely linear RPGs where the main gameplay is a ton of repetitive grinding.One could argue that the folk watching that type of game streamed instead of buying it wouldn't have purchased it anyway. The game still gets hype, now also by the people that didn't buy it. Overall, the publisher sees more sales.
Last edited by 14 on 25 October 2020 at 3:55 am UTC
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Quoting: minfaerYou were understandably confused. Using the pronoun they for a singular person is a new trend and not what anyone was taught in English.Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: minfaerBtw, the article confuses me. It sounds like Hutchinson tweeted this by himself, but then keeps using 'they' as if it was his studio's (or some groups) stance. Which is it?Hutchinson did tweet directly, not from a studio account. Perhaps you're tripping up on singular they? Don't know, hard to tell, as you didn't point out the parts confusing you. When talking about a person, using "they" is just pretty normal here.
Thanks for claryfing, that was indeed what tripped me up. Non-native speaker here
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Quoting: 14You were understandably confused. Using the pronoun they for a singular person is a new trend and not what anyone was taught in English.Singular they dates back to Shakespeare, so as a concept it is not new. It is relatively poorly taught though and it might be in more active use these days than before.
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Schattenspiegel Oct 25, 2020
Quoting: 14If you read the article you will find that the problem people are having here is not the existence of singular-they, but the way it is used in the aforementioned. The article starts by using they/them for the company Google. It then already starts to muddy the waters a bit by making it unclear if the next usages refer to Google or Stadia, but in the context of the article that seems somewhat neglectable. And the it starts to get ambiguous by throwing the singular-they into the mix in reference to Alex Hutchinson:Quoting: minfaerYou were understandably confused. Using the pronoun they for a singular person is a new trend and not what anyone was taught in English.Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: minfaerBtw, the article confuses me. It sounds like Hutchinson tweeted this by himself, but then keeps using 'they' as if it was his studio's (or some groups) stance. Which is it?Hutchinson did tweet directly, not from a studio account. Perhaps you're tripping up on singular they? Don't know, hard to tell, as you didn't point out the parts confusing you. When talking about a person, using "they" is just pretty normal here.
Thanks for claryfing, that was indeed what tripped me up. Non-native speaker here
QuoteSo that all sounds pretty reasonable, some nice games coming to Google's Linux-powered streaming service Stadia. Where did it go wrong then? Well, they're currently enjoying a serious round of bad press and Stadia ended up trending all across Twitter, and not for positive reasons.Who's twitter bio? Stadias or Hutchinsons?
The problem was Alex Hutchinson, who according to their Twitter bio was the "Creative Director for Google Stadia" that tweeted out these thoughts:
Quoting: Liam DaweNot exactly a good look, coming from a person who works for a currently not exactly popular service streaming games. Even worse when they posted these up with what their Twitter bio said they were.Again, who's? The 'currently not exactly popular service streaming games' or the 'person'?
And the list goes on.
Nothing wrong with the idea behind the singular-they, but you simply can not use it (without further definition) in situations where it conflicts with the plural-they if you want to share information.
1 Likes, Who?
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