fair use gaming.

samanthagirlgamer

samanthagirlgamer

Member
so I have a question I have read up on fair use and youtube policies so I was wondering how do you upload your gameplay to youtube without getting in trouble I am deaf and am not very fluent with speaking and I have no good mic even if I could I have seen where your supposed to commentate but there are channels who claim they have no commentary so any help would be much appreciated.
 
I've definitely seen videos of just gameplay with some background music, but maybe it has to be only specific segments. Like maybe you can't post cutscenes with acting, you can only post scenes where you fight or where you are controlling the situation. Hope that made some sense! :)
 
What I've seen around Youtube without commentary are excerpts of the highlights of your gameplay, for instance a funny moment, an epic moment, a glitch... Whatever you think will captivate the viewer :) But you can definitely go further, and think of something else - you're not limited to that ^^
 
Let's Play videos (with commentary) and No Commentary Walkthroughs (that don't have commentary, obviously) are both a legal gray area. There haven't been any court cases, so there is no precedent on what is fair use or not. However, it's probably not likely that either is fair use (even if Let's Players want to think that their commentary is "transformative")

So, instead, the reason Let's Plays and No-Commentary Walkthroughs stay up is more because most game developers (but NOT all) simply never pursue any action.

You have to look up what each developer's policies are. Some are OK with gameplay as long as there are no spoilers, no pre-release material, and no cutscenes. If you search for "Let's play friendly developers" you should find an article collecting several developers' responses...these should generally apply to no-commentary gameplay.
 
There are channels that do entire let's plays without commentary. They sometimes only include their own intro and that is it. Whether or not that is possible for your video or specific game will mainly depend on the developer. I know that Ubisoft, for example, is quite lenient. Last time I checked, they were fine with showing gameplay footage and even allowed monetization of the content through YouTube Partnership. It is probably best to check how the developer of your game stands on monetizing the content. Just playing a game and showing that content on YouTube without monetizing the video is unlikely to get you into trouble, though.
 
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