Controversial developer Phil Fish, who abruptly cancelled development of Fez 2 last year over a heated Twitter debate, has once again raised eyebrows on the social network, claiming that YouTubers are 'stealing' from game developers.
At the beginning of a series of tweets captured by GameSpot, the developer wrote:
"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 went on to add that:
"If you generate money from putting my content on your channel, you owe me money. Simple as that. If you buy a movie, are you then allowed to stream the entirety of it publicly for people to watch for free? No, because that's illegal.
"Systems are in place to prevent that. But buy Fez, put ALL of it on YouTube, turn on ads, make money from it and that's TOTALLY FINE. And the developer should in NO WAY be compensated for their work being freely distributed to the world. Right. Makes sense."
Afterwards, and perhaps in response to a surge of negative comments, Fish wrote "Nevermind" and protected his account. A search of Twitter no longer appears to show the account, which would be included in search results even if protected, possibly suggesting he has deleted it.
What Fish does not appear to have taken into consideration is the fact that YouTube allows for ContentID match and copyright owner monetisation – a policy which has proven controversial for Nintendo who last month announced an "affliate program" to share revenues with YouTubers.
It was revealed earlier this week that PewDiePie earns a staggering $4 million annually from his YouTube gaming videos.