spike niconico channel launched
Niconico douga has announced today that they are starting a new video service called spike niconico channel which will be for games that are being distributed by spike in Japan. It currently has trailers games such as Bioshock and Tomb Raider, and they hope to expand to have gameplay videos and interviews.
Now I’m sure it’s completely unrelated but on the same day, niconico has started deleting tons of gameplay videos of Nintendo-owned games due to “requests from the copyright holder” such as the videos of people playing modified versions of Mario and Pokemon, and the videos of fully automatic Mario which had been pretty popular, and especially the recent one of the gumi kyoku. (it’s still up on youtube)
As a result of the deletions, the total number of videos viewed across all videos in niconico douga has dropped by 20 million views today.
I don’t know if it’s just Nintendo or if they’re planning to eventually remove all gameplay videos from the site, but this sucks.
