Yogscast have taken it upon themselves to charge a premium to feature indie games. The premium being a share of profits in the increase of sales their videos create. This is to help assist the livelyhood of their content providers and to ensure that they produce content on something other than the popular games.
This was unearthed by Gamasutra here earlier today arising from an open letter to Reddit which can be found here. I can only hope to spread the word further via this article whilst firmly stamping my own opinion on it (in a considerably less expletive filled rant than I unleashed on Twitter). Hopefully, if you know a little about Senshudo, you should be safe in the knowledge that this is something I and we absolutely can not justify.
Yogscast, a bunch of people that already profit from ad revenue from utilising footage from games, now wish to further profit by making smaller games studios feel obliged to metaphorically grab their ankles for prominent coverage. They want to take a slice of profits from the sale of games that they in no way made, created or supported other than when utilising them to create profits for themselves.
Space Engineers (a game that has otherwise been seemingly successfully via Steam) is the first game to be taking part in this in exchange for a 'small' share of profits. This will include in-game items and Yogscast videos which the publisher has no editorial control over.
This all pangs of a group of gamers that provide promotional content for a profit trying to shift into a PR agency without the hassle of actually needing to send out press releases or treat indie studios with any form of dignity. If you would like content produced based around a particular subject, the correct course is to find those that will or to forgo the subject altogether. For those that need it spelled out, the correct course is not to find an angle to suck out some small profit an indie has poured their blood, sweat and tears into to encourage your team to work around it.
I understand that business needs to be done and that profits need to be made, but this is not the way. It is extremely difficult to succeed as an indie, they rely on games media to prop them up. They need every single penny they can get so they can stop working all-nighters in their parent's basement to make ends meet and hit deadlines. They need every penny they can get to funnel into their next project which might just be the one that makes it for them.
While Senshudo do not currently compete on the level that Yogscast do, no matter how much sway we hold now or in the future, we would never ask the most passionate and struggling developers we encounter to give up a percentage of their livelyhood to encourage us to promote them. I would sooner work part time in a job I hate than take a penny away from an indie studio.
If anything, we should be providing an ad revenue percentage to those studios kind enough to provide a free copy of their game for us to review and share with the world. We should be thanking them for their kindness and rewarding them for their passion.
While I am loathe to deter people from purchasing indie games featured by Yogscast or indeed supporting those individuals that work within Yogscast as this is a living for them, this is disgusting behaviour by a company that should know better. If you have close enough links with indie developers that you can offer deals like this, you should be close enough to have enough heart to support them rather than tax them.