Fez Creator Calls Let's Plays Piracy

Alright, quick recap: Some of you may or may not remember, but acclaimed Indie game Fez creator, Phil Fish, never did get along well with his fans.  A mix of negative press, confrontational fans, and a twitter argument with another internet journalist finally pushed Mr. Fish past his limit, leading him to announce his retirement from game development “forever” and the cancelation of the highly anticipated Fez 2.  Since then, he’s done a pretty good job at staying out of the spotlight, except during April’s Fools when he jokingly claimed he was going to finish Fez 2.  A little tasteless, in my opinion, but we’re not here to judge him.  Yet.

Anyway, just recently Phil Fish broke his silence again—and once again, his twitter remarks have exploded with controversy.  In a several-tweet long rant, Phil rather vocally expressed how much he dislikes the “Let’s Play” phenomenon over Youtube, calling people who upload gameplay to their channels “No better than pirates”. 

"YouTubers should have to pay out a huge portion of their revenue to the developers from which they steal all their content.  [Ad] revenue should be shared with developers.  This should be built into YouTube. Anything else is basically piracy."

He continued to tweet...

"If you generate money from putting my content on your channel, you owe me money. Simple as that," "[someone could] buy Fez, put ALL of it on YouTube, turn on ads, make money from it and that's TOTALLY FINE."

Two things: first of all, a developer doing a let’s play of their own game while talking about their choices in design and telling stories about development would be a lot of fun—think about it, Phil.  Secondly, this sounds startlingly similar to Nintendo’s stance on the subject until they announced their “affiliate program”, the details of which remain elusive at the moment.   Either way, it shouldn’t take a journalist to tell you his views are controversial and in the minority.

The Twitter account he posted this rant on soon became private to avoid backlash from angry followers, and soon after was just completely deleted, but I don’t think that’s going to do much for him to evade the anger of gamers who disagree.  Especially since he’s not exactly cherished in this community anymore.   

Well, you reap what you sow, I guess.  He would know better than anyone what to expect when you tweet something like that.