Since the advent of the internet, the barrier between what is free and what is paid for has become so blurred that we could practically say that it has completely disappeared. But the market is evolving, and today there are thousands of absolutely essential payment services that many users gladly pay for, but that a few years ago it was unthinkable to imagine. So would you see yourself paying for stream games?
The right to stream
That is the idea raised by Alex Hutchinson, the creative director of SG&E Montreal Studio (one of the Google Stadia studios), who through a tweet showed his astonishment to discover that many streamers were really offended when their uploaded videos are canceled for music copyrights.
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.
- Alex Hutchinson (@BangBangClick) October 22, 2020
Hutchinson assured that streamers should open their eyes, since, according to him, this content generates income using materials for which they have not paid for them. In short, they protest when they use music without rights, but they still earn money by making game videos for which they have not paid for it. Do you agree?
Controversy
As expected, the gaming community was quick to pounce on the creative, assuring that they would have every right in the world to do what they wanted with a game that they had previously paid for, so it wouldn't make any sense to have to pay for this strange rate that Hutchinson proposes.
Idk maybe you're getting flak because you're picking this particular battle in a world where C-suite executives make $30m/year and devs don't get royalties so they'd never see any of that streaming money in the first place
- Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) October 22, 2020
As if that were not enough, some important figures in the industry, such as the journalist Jason Schreier, responded with a simple approach, and that is that in the event of that rate being applied, precisely the developers that Hutchinson defends would not see any cent, so that everything would fall back to where it always was: to those who earn the most.
Not good publicity for Stadia
The launch of Stadia It ended up being pretty watered down. Google's proposal has not finished convincing the public, and not because of its performance, but rather because of the approach. Paying for each game that we want to play remotely, in addition to having to pay a monthly fee to access the service, is not a particularly tempting offer given proposals as complete as Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Now, so these types of statements do a disservice service.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Google wanted to step aside and separate from these statements, since through a statement sent to 9to5Google, the company ensures that the opinions of the creative director do not represent the ideals of the company or its affiliates YouTube or Google Stadia.
The forced payment, goes wrong
This idea of paying for streaming is not inevitably reminiscent of the tax applied in Spain for linking news from information media on Google News. This caused the closure of the service in Spain, since it was a completely harmful measure, not only for the service, but also for the user.
Taking this fact into account, applying a tax to streaming would be a measure of the same type, and would affect the freedom of published content, which is basically the success of the freshness and originality that characterizes this type of content.