Japanese indie dev finds a unique way to automatically profit from YouTubers streaming their game

Japanese indie developer SCIKA recently released their new mystery adventure game Inverted Angel. As is often the case with Japanese titles, the game comes with guidelines for those who plan to stream and upload gameplay videos of it. However, one unusual rule defined by SCIKA has attracted a lot of attention in the community, and the reason behind it is quite ingenious.

Streaming guidelines often prohibit a game’s ending from being shown in its entirety or require content creators to appropriately warn viewers of spoilers. If a game uses existing songs in its BGM, the developer may warn streamers to mute sections of the game to prevent copyright issues.

However, Inverted Angel’s developer SCIKA seems to do the opposite. As well as actively encouraging content creators to stream the game’s ending, the developer requires that the ending’s original audio, including the theme song, not be muted.

*In Inverted Angel, you need to figure out the identity of a mysterious girl who claims to be your girlfriend*

Using YouTube’s existing features to distribute ad revenue

The developer explains that when streamed or uploaded to YouTube, Inverted Angel’s theme song brings them advertising revenue through Content ID. Content ID is YouTube’s automated content identification system. It works by having copyright owners submit their audio or video files to a database, which is then used to automatically identify copyrighted content in videos uploaded to the platform. When a match is found, the video in question receives a Content ID claim, and this claim results in the video being automatically monetized (if the copyright owner has so selected).

As SCIKA themselves are the writer and copyright owner of Inverted Angel’s theme song, they have essentially found unique a way to share ad revenue with people streaming their game using the song and YouTube’s built in Content ID system.

As an aside, Inverted Angel is an interesting mystery game that makes use of NLP AI (not generative AI) to allow the player to make free text inputs in response to the scenario. While it is currently only available in Japanese, the Steam store page indicates that English language support will be added through subsequent updates.

Translated by Amber V (original article’s publication date: 2024-07-06 17:58)