Guild Wars 2

What Happened

There was a lot of drama and uproar regarding monetizing GW2 videos on YouTube, because of the following thread on the forums:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-for-posting-videos-on-Youtube-others/

I explain why all the concern on the part of the players was largely unwarranted in the following vlog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ho2ADvndQ4

Why There’s Nothing for Gamers to Worry About

The ArenaNet employee who posted the initial response in the above thread can be faulted for not anticipating that what she wrote would generate a poopstorm. However, later in the thread she clarified ArenaNet’s stance, and that stance is consistent with how game developers regard the YouTube community.

Game developers typically don’t grant permission to customers to make gameplay videos or monetize those videos in the Terms of Use. That said, in practice they typically won’t submit a copyright infringement claim against a gameplay video unless they feel the video is harmful to their product.

Why don’t games developers broadly grant permission to make gameplay videos? It has to do with business risk. While a given YouTuber may have good intentions, there’s no way for the game developer to know for sure that that intent will be executed in a way that they are comfortable with. Moreover the game developer needs to retain the right to have a video pulled down, if they believe the video is harmful to their product.

Links to YouTube monetization, Fair Use

YouTube’s take on monetization for gaming videos: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138161

FAQs on YouTube for monetization: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1115890

“Fair Use” doctrine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use