YouTube Has Begun A Mass Cull Of Gaming Videos - And Game Companies Hate It

YouTube has begun a mass cull of gaming videos, seriously affecting creators that make money from their channels.

Since Monday, YouTube has been striking the channels of game presenters, who often have clips of copyrighted material in their videos, reports the site Computer and Video Games. These "strikes" mean that any future revenue made from the videos gets redirected to the copyright owner and not the person that made the video.

But it's not the video game makers who are ordering these strikes.

YouTube has implemented a tougher new technology that auto-detects and flags breaches of copyright, like music or gameplay, according to CVG. Now, the video game companies are rallying to help users restore their businesses.

Representatives from Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft and StarCraft developer), Deep Silver, Ubisoft, and Capcorn have issued statements, either on Twitter or to the press, urging users with flagged content to contest the strikes so that the companies can approve the videos and let the creators get their revenue back.

If you're a YouTuber and are receiving content matches with the new changes, please be sure to contest them so we can quickly approve them.

- StarCraft (@StarCraft) December 10, 2013

Check out this in-depth, personal explainer of the issue by GhostRobo, a video game presenter with more than 600,000 subscribers: