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Nintendo gives influencers bad news on YouTube livestreams

Nintendo gives influencers bad news on YouTube livestreams

Nintendo's approach to YouTubers creating videos using its games is under scrutiny again, but this time the focus is live streams.

Journalist Daan Koopman has posted on Twitter a screenshot of an email sent to a friend who's part of the Nintendo Creators Program, which is the company's initiative to share YouTube ad revenues with the channels that post videos using its games.

The email sets out Nintendo's policy on live streams using the YouTube Live system. In short, the policy is that it isn't supported yet.

"Live streaming on YouTube falls outside the scope of the Nintendo Creators Program. This means that you cannot broadcast content on YouTube Live from the account you have registered to the Nintendo Creators Program," explained the email.

This is confirmed by an addition to the Creators Program's terms, which provides more advice.

"If you plan to broadcast content on YouTube Live, you have a couple of options. First, you can broadcast content on YouTube Live from a channel that is not registered to the Nintendo Creators Program," explains Nintendo.

"Or, you can cancel your channel's registration to the Nintendo Creators Program and instead, register your videos containing Nintendo’s IP to the program separately."

So, Nintendo isn't barring YouTubers from broadcasting live footage of themselves playing its games, but it remains to be seen how many will chafe at the suggestion that should use another channel or spend time re-registering all their existing (non-live) videos to share ad revenues.


Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)