Twice now the vids I’ve favorited for one specific song from Sunless Sea have been taken down from YouTube. Why do this? It isn’t going make me anymore likely to buy the game’s soundtrack. In fact, it will almost certainly do the opposite since I’m likely to not hear the music and forget about it. I do sometimes buy soundtracks to support devs, but I never actually listen to the soundtrack itself. Youtube is basically my sole music listening tool at this point simply because it is more convenient than any other option. I can listen to my youtube favorites from anywhere with an internet connection and I don’t have any kind of device exclusively for listening to songs.
The vast majority of other game companies do not get their songs pulled off of Youtube and when they do get pulled, Youtube doesn’t tell you what the song was. So if you can’t remember what those few songs were that you favorited many months ago were, well you have no idea what was taken down and can’t track down how to replace them.
As one final argument for allowing youtube soundtrack postings, I’m often reminded of the existence of games when I hear specific songs from my favorite list and will sometimes go and play that game because of that reminder. A few games in my library have gotten a significant amount of extra play because of this reason alone, including Sunless Sea. By taking that away from me, I’m simply going to forget that this game and company exist and probably won’t come back. edited by DarkMaster on 10/2/2015
Do us both a favour, go to the site that google maintains with every takedown notice and find the record of the takedown request for both of those vids?
I understand that you must be upset about losing a way to listen to what is an amazing soundtrack, but you must realize that the people who are uploading the soundtrack independent of FB are pirating music and that by listening to their stolen music, you are both complicit and supportive of this act.
It is not as if FB games is rolling in cash, they are a small indie studio, and even if they weren’t why should anyone be able to tell them to give away things that people have worked hard to create, for free? If you wrote a book or a symphony to sell, would you be happy when someone comes along and reads/listens for free? You would be, and FB is, dependent upon income that is now denied because other people want to enjoy your work without paying for it.
You may buy the music after listening a few times, but I guarantee that the majority do not. One noble pirate doesn’t change what piracy is.
We can no more ask FB to release the soundtrack for free than we can ask them to make exceptional friendship, sunless sea, and fate purchases free. Even if they aren’t/weren’t dependent on the money, we cannot in right conscience demand an artist to ignore the theft of their creations, no more than we can demand restaurants to give us food for free, or demand that Microsoft hand out computers for free.
Art is something with worth, by pirating and asking for free access, we devalue it. Failbetter has been kind to allow us to play a HUGE portion of their creations for free in Fallen London, asking for more when they are already giving so much seems kind of greedy to me.
I did buy the game, I don’t really feel like it makes much sense to expect me to jump through a bunch of hoops to listen to the music when I can legally get the same effect just from booting the game up and loading a save in the right spot (or retiring, since the only song I care about here is "Hope is an Anchor"). I’ve gone through running games in soundtest, used bandcamp, and official soundtrack files in music folders. I’ve found Youtube to be the best way to keep everything in one place that I don’t have to transfer from computer to computer. Now I do run adblock, so they won’t make any money off of me listening to the songs there.
If you want to avoid piracy, the best thing to do is to make it so that the legal option is the easiest and most convenient. In most cases with piracy, I simply end up not caring if what I’m doing is legal or not, only that it’s convenient. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to waste a bunch of time signing into everything and navigating through a bunch of different services every time I want to listen to a song.
The strangest thing is that this is the first indie studio that I’ve actually had this problem with. I’ve got over two hundred songs in my current Youtube favorites, all from games I’ve bought. This is the first time I’ve had the issue of a song get taken down multiple times. edited by DarkMaster on 10/2/2015 edited by DarkMaster on 10/2/2015
To be fair to DarkMaster, I don’t think FB is really losing money on this one. Few people are going to get the music, and those that do likely do it more to support FB than to actually have the music in a convenient fashion (it isn’t even that convenient). Even big studios that are really protective of their property don’t take down songs most of the time, Nintendo coming to mind. I mean, purchasing music like this is pretty old-fashioned. I can’t think of anyone that would really be purchasing the music for the music’s sake, so I can’t see a lot of harm done.
In any case, if someone was really committed to this, there are ways and there are means to listen to it on YouTube, which I won’t post here for obvious reasons. I hate to be the guy defending piracy, but here I’d wager it’s not worth it to take down the vids.