Game streaming has become incredibly popular in recent years. It’s blown up so quickly that there is no generally agreed upon way to handle it. Everything from Twitch streams to Let’s Play videos have the potential for monetization while using material copyrighted by another. It is certainly a murky legal area and it’s understandable that there are multiple opinions and everybody is struggling to find a solution. Square Enix solution is probably not the right one.
Kotaku has reviewed the streaming parameters that Sqeenix has set forth for Dragon Quest Heroes and they’re more than a little nuts. While Square is permitting streaming of the game they have some fairly strange limitations. Among them is the fact that apparently if you want to stream the game’s music you can only stream on YouTube. Streaming the music on Twitch has the potential to get you into trouble. Check out the full distribution guidelines here:
Those are not all the rules however. Because you also need to make sure that there’s a copyright notice in the corner of any game footage you stream. The good news is that Square will be making an update to the game in the future to add the copyright info automatically. Until that happens however, you need to make sure to do it yourself.
Also, Square Enix may just decide to delete your video at their sole discretion, which means even if you do everything right, they may screw you anyway.
While we’d love to give Square Enix the benefit of the doubt because, again, this is absolutely a confusing topic that nobody has a clear handle on, but this is more than extreme. Either streaming is ok or it is not. At least a binary choice makes everything simple for the company and the streamers. Is Square really going to police all of these nuanced rules? It seems like a waste of everybody’s time.
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