As many other people have said, this whole debacle shows Nintendo still doesn't understand the Internet.

If I wanted to forge a Nefarious Sword of Evil Deeds, I'd use Nintendo's Brass.

Well, this is the line in their agreement that they're going to have trouble keeping up with if they under-estimated the number of people signing up: "It can regularly take up to three business days for your registered content to be reviewed and finalized." They say "up to", but I don't think they realize how many hours of "Let's Play" footage they're going to get every single day.

Let's say that the average "Let's Play" episode is 23 minutes long (it varies quite a lot more than that, but just to look at minimum values here.) So, to give Nintendo a full 24-hours' worth of videos to look through, it would take about 63 people uploading videos daily. Now, that's not taking into account the people who occasionally do 8 hour livestreams on Twitch, and then just upload the VOD to Youtube. All it takes is just one of those people in the program to eat up a significant amount of time and greatly increase the workload. Heck, it's hard just to keep up with all of the uploads that Let's Play channels put out each day when you're casually following less than 10 of them that put videos out daily. Nintendo might have a lot of money, but unless their banks are also stuffed with "time", then this isn't going to be as easy as they think it is.

They can speed the videos up and divide them up between multiple people, sure, but if they're going to enforce their code of conduct saying that the videos can't contain any "obscene" or "objectionable content" (subject to whatever Nintendo's definitions of those are), then they're going to have to actually listen to the videos if they're serious about curating them. So, playing them at any speed where the audio can't be understood wouldn't be an option for them.

I think it's definitely within the realm of possibility that we'll see them get overloaded with this. Unfortunately, even if they do become overwhelmed and cancel the program, it would probably be hoping for too much for them to actually stop flagging videos for copyright.

Know what's funny? I used to really like Nintendo...then I started to read videogame history books and took an interest in game development. Things stopped looking rosy when I figured out that game business has an tremendous effect on the games that I play.

I want games to thrive, but that requires the people behind them to have their business in order. That is one of the reasons that I am so disappointed with Nintendo, because they are hamstringing themselves.

And there's at least 63 people and some channels dedicated to only Nintendo stuff...

Let's not forget they only have a select list of games they are willing to watch over. I wonder if they have enough English staff to deal with YouTube's flow of data.

Hmmm... Based on how much content gets uploaded to Youtube (every hour like 48 hours of content is uploaded) i wonder if they will come to realize they just created a program that will spam them like crazy... And they won't have the amount of employees to handle the flow, sooner or later the sheer number will cancel out profits from ad revenue.

I still hope this fails, but HOWit fails may be quite interesting to see...

If we're talking about all content uploaded to Youtube, then it's far more than that, my friend:

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

"100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute"

Now, I'm sure that Nintendo videos don't pile up at such an insane rate, but it certainly does put things into perspective when thinking about how much extra time each individual person who signs up for this, now and in the future of the program's (hopefully-short) lifespan, detracts further from their ability to go through all of this content. A small channel could join that is running ads, but barely has any subscribers or viewers, and ultimately just wastes even more time for Nintendo if the video is at least valid and needs to be approved.

That's not even taking into account the ability to upload individual videos, rather than your whole channel; just think of all the Legend of Zelda videos that are going to hit immediately after a new release, even from non-Nintendo channels. Do you think you can keep up, Nintendo?

Thanks to that line about them being able to change revenue-sharing splits between the "creator" and Nintendo, I wonder if their first move in that situation will be to say "We're not bringing in enough money to make this profitable. We're increasing the percentage of ad revenue that Nintendo takes. Please Understand."

There are probably tons of channels completely under the radar, that none of us even know exist, that are sitting on those deep pages of the search results for videos, and the program seems to have no rules that would turn them down. Those are the channels that are really going to drag this program down, because the more videos they have to go through that come from channels making a pittance (even before the revenue split), the more time they've just spent paying full wages to the staff that has to go through literally pennies worth of content. Let's all hope that those tiny channels are what end up making up the majority of this program, because there will definitely be a point where taking even 95% of the revenue wouldn't cover the cost of the time that they've spent. Go, tiny channels, go! Flood that program! :P I mean, it would be better if no one signed up in the first place, obviously, but it's too late for that now.

Let's hope that it does collapse, and that when it does, all the other big publishers out there are watching. The only good that can come of the program would be through it becoming an example of what not to do for those companies who are watching and waiting to see how viable it is for themselves.

There was a story a while ago about the guy who used to manage Nintendo's relations with indie developers being told not to use Twitter anymore by Nintendo after he was vocal in sympathizing with some indie developers about a few of the controversial issues that Nintendo faces, like region-locking. That guy later left the company, and he said something interesting about how the company works internally. A lot of the decisions made have to go through their headquarters in Kyoto, Japan, which he explained by saying that Kyoto is to Japan what Japan is to us, in terms of how traditional they are. When a decision reaches the headquarters, it can apparently be vetoed by any one of the higher-ups and struck down if they don't like it, according to the guy. Nintendo has a lot of "corporate dinosaurs" who got in during the NES era, and they just aren't adjusting to the rapidly-changing environment. So, those video game history books that you were talking about are probably even more relevant to how Nintendo operates today than they really should be so many years later.

Just look at them making announcements recently about making both Pokemon and Luigi's Mansion arcade cabinets. It just speaks volumes about someone high up at Nintendo being really far behind the rest of the world, where arcades are...irrelevant, to say the least.

There was also a separate account of an anonymous indie developer talking about their experience working with Nintendo, and talking to some of the senior members in a Skype conference call about some of the online features that the Wii U was going to be launching with, so that he could properly make use of his development-kit before the system launched. When he started making references to things that Xbox Live and the Playstation Network already did at the time, the senior members cut him off and basically told him that they won't understand the references, because they've never used either of those online services before. So, they've had lots of opportunities to even just take a look at what their competition is doing better than them, and they've not bothered.

I don't know. Their brass is looking rather tarnished and old these days. I mean yeah, they keep it shiny, but they've been stretching it thin these days.
Makes me wonder how much Nintendo would panic upon coming across a place like the World of Longplays..

If i understand it right, when you submit your whole channel you can only do it with the videos they support, meaning you have to remove any videos that they aren't willing to pay you for.

But 100 every minute? Hmmm... Considering that the most popular and longest videos are for video games, that seems like a good thing on our side.

If there's 1-2, they probably won't. If there's a dozen or two dozen doing daily videos... That will quickly add up.

At some point whoever's watching the videos will stop watching them and just allow them in bulk, quit, or start sleeping through them just so they can say they watched them.

Hmm be better if they spoke like 20 languages and started changing languages every few minutes to describe something more natively and requiring nintendo to have a whole slew of translators occupied for a single video :P

Well, the problem is more that there's a massive backlog and that many of the NES, SNES, N64, GCN and such games (including some Nintendo arcade titles) aren't on the list.

Do you think people won't look over the list and will submit their whole channel of old NES titles for Nintendo to wad through? Or more importantly channels will say 'either you take it all, or f**k you because it's all your own crap' type of attitude?

Honestly if they refuse a channel that contains a lot of official Nintendo games but the games are just so old they feel it isn't worth their time, they'd be alienating a huge retro genre of channels. And i'm sure a number of channels aren't going to split off to a 'Nintendo Shared Marketing' channel which only conforms to their games if they have hundreds of videos and few (or most) comply. Just seems like a lot of busy work...

I don't know... Bottome line? I just hope the program fails (and hopefully fantastically).

The language in it is confusing, but there seem to be two options for people wanting to not get Nintendo videos copyright claimed: Register individual videos for a 60/40 split, or register your whole channel for a 70/30 split. The wording makes it sound to me like you only need to remove non-Nintendo videos if you take the 70/30 option and register your whole channel for the extra split, whereas the other option is just for specific videos, without the entire channel being affected/evaluated.

Talking about channels with non-Nintendo videos, it says "If you are unable to remove the video from your channel, please register each video that contains game titles on the list of supported games individually."

Perhaps I'm reading it wrong? What do you guys think? They haven't exactly been super-clear about this whole thing...

Actually it's quite clear. There was a part in there that you should remove any games that aren't on the list before submitting your channel, so your channel should only be games they support/want. This means you can't use your 'Nintendo Partner Channel' to do other stuff like Bushcraft or cat videos; Even if i don't see why it wouldn't work...

Although for the 3-day waiting period (or longer if there's a huge backlog) might be the largest deterrent because sometimes you just can't wait 3+ days, and Youtube/Google might delay your video for several hours before putting it up anyways; Or worse is if they were to keep a constant eye on all videos rather than the first say 10-20 to see that you aren't going to be putting up crap or breaking TOS of the partnership. RTU went on this a little of his worries... (although i was sure it wasn't 4 days ago, so maybe that video is gone now...)

Oh, so what you're saying is that even if you pick the 60/40 option to register only an individual video on a channel, then the entire channel still has to abide to the whitelist? If so, then that's even worse than what it seemed like when I originally read this:

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

- You can register single videos or entire channels.

- 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. If you only want some videos to apply to this program, please register each video individually.

- You can only use channels or videos that contain copyrighted content related to game titles specified by Nintendo, and they must be your original creations. Be sure your videos do not contain copyrighted material from third parties or content from unconfirmed game titles. See here for a list of Nintendo game titles specified for use with this program.

I figured from the wording that you were able to have them just look at one video if you didn't want to do the whole channel, but the split wasn't as good. I hope that you can see where I was confused, then.

No, only if you register the entire channel. Individual videos are their own thing where Nintendo shaves another 10% because they can :P