This has been an extremely busy week for YouTube gaming channel, the Yogscast. The Yogscast have one of the largest channels on Youtube with over 7 million subscribers on their main channel alone. With a large focus on Minecraft, they have a huge following. One thing the Yogscast have always been praised for is how much they play and review indie games.
That is, until this week. PR representative for the Yogscast, Mark Turpin posted an open letter on Reddit about their new ‘project’, YogDiscovery. This scheme means that indie developers will make a deal with the channel so the Yogscast get a cut of game sales. This leaves a foul taste in my mouth for a few reasons. Let me preface this by saying I am a huge fan of the Yogscast and have been for years. I’m very invested in the community and I can honestly say that about 90% of us aren’t okay with this.
So why isn’t this a good idea? Sounds like just paying for advertising? Well, yes. Expect there are a few flaws. The deal is that the Yogscast play what we’ll call Game X. They get a percentage of sales once their video goes live for a certain time period. This cut is said to be 10%. Now, my first problem with this is what if someone like TotalBiscuit or even PewDiePie covers the same game in the same time frame? Should they get a percentage of these sales? Their video may have generated more sales than the Yogscast did. This is extremely messy and will deter other channels from covering these indie games.
This brings me to my second point on the issue. It’s amazing that in this day and age, indie games are popping up left, right and centre. Every day more games get greenlit on Steam, which is brilliant. But unless these developers are very lucky, they won’t make a huge amount of money from their small game. So with the Yogscast taking a percentage of sales, will it really be worth it for indie developers? Games are extremely costly, and the Yogscast are no strangers to that concept.
In October 2011, the Yogscast in partnership with Winterkewl Games, created a Kickstarter for their game, Yogventures. The game gained over double it’s target goal in no time, giving the developers $567,647 to work with. Two years later, we’d seen no progress. Until this week, that is. Winterkewl Games have gone bankrupt and closed down. The game is not finished and the company is broke. Backers are furious, which is understandable. Lewis Brindley, co-founder of the Yogscast has stated in an e-mail to backers, “Although we’re under no obligation to do anything, instead we’re going to do our best to make this right, and make you really glad you backed the project!” This means giving Steam keys for a totally different game and some other unspecified ‘experiences’.
As a fan, I’m hugely disappointed by all of this and hope it gets rectified soon.
