Where Has Our YouTube Channel Gone?
Regular visitors of the site and our loyal YouTube subscribers may have noticed this morning that the Nintendo Times YouTube channel has been removed. This comes as a huge surprise to us, as we sure it does to you.
The original purpose of the channel was to have a single place for all of the trailers, commercials, and archival footage of games on Nintendo systems. We thought it would be great to have everything consolidated on one channel, so that if Nintendo Japan posted a commercial for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we would have it right next to the other counties’ commercials and official trailers of the game. In addition, especially for those that viewed our channel on a desktop computer, we had playlists for every game and then organized them by release date, which created a great upcoming game release calendar resource. We had heard from many of you that you liked this feature.
Also, we always hated visiting sites that had embedded video from another YouTube account, only to have the video removed later and it become inaccessible. Ironically, thanks to this surprising development, most of the videos on Nintendo Times will be down.
So, what happened? Well, YouTube is saying we violated its “Spam, Deceptive Practices & Scams” policy. According to their policy page it’s clear that they have wide range of criteria that can terminate a channel. We know we didn’t fall into any of the devious categories like scamming or racy thumbnails or misleading metadata. So, that leads us to believe that they think we violated the “It’s not okay to post large amounts of repetitive and/or re-uploaded videos to your channel”.
This makes some sense because after all, we did mostly post trailers for upcoming games and those trailers came from the publishers. However many of them were sent to us directly through press releases, although some of the commercials and official Nintendo Direct footage did come directly from Nintendo’s YouTube accounts. Of course, that was OK because we were part of the Nintendo Creators Program and we had permission to repost their content. So, we fail to see how this would have grossly violated YouTube’s terms. Of course we also featured original content, like our Nintendo Times Radio and Warp Zone podcasts.
We have reached out to YouTube for an appeal and clarification. They replied back a few hours later with basically the same statement, giving us no further indication as to which video(s) were responsible for the take down of an entire channel. It’s alarming that a channel such as ours can go from good standing with not a single strike against it to one that’s been terminated without a single warning. We were completely blindsided and although we believe we did nothing wrong, YouTube does. It would be nice if they could be clearer on how they came to that conclusion.
For now, we will simply embed YouTube content into news articles. Honestly it’s far easier and quicker to do. We will be taking down links to the YouTube channel for now. If it’s reinstated in the future we will update you on the matter. Thanks for your support and understanding!
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
