The question of monetising video content on Youtube is one of those subjects that’s been debated back and forth for years now. There are some who say that it isn’t fair for people to make money off playing games that weren’t made by the content creator themselves, but there’s a lot of proof that such videos can be fantastic advertising for video games of all sorts.

Game companies are mostly in favour of it, although there are a lot of different approaches and guidelines for how people can monetise content based off their properties. Some like Nintendo have opted to claim the revenue themselves unless you’re part of their content program, while others (mainly indie studios) have expressly given creators permission to monetise videos based on their game. Others haven’t put across anything concrete.

Now Microsoft Studios have made public a set of guidelines for content creators, and they seem pretty sensible. They favour the content creators but take steps to help Microsoft protect their intellectual properties.

Firstly the policy forbids reverse engineering of games, meaning assets cannot be extracted and therefore you can only use the game to do what they programmed it to be feasible to do within it. Secondly you cannot one of their games to create a video that contains any number of offensive types of content including but not limited to: pornographic content, lewd or obscene content, discriminatory (on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation), anything that promotes violence, drug use etc. and many other objectionable forms of content.

They are also forbidding the use of their logos in your own logos (no using the Xbox X to replace the letter), and stress that anything created should not be attempting to appear official or can be mistaken for official content at all. There’s also a little bit of text that needs to be included somewhere with the video, either in the description or as part of the video itself, somewhere where “anyone who sees your Item will easily find [it].”

[Name of the Microsoft Game] © Microsoft Corporation. [The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from [Name of the Microsoft Game], and it is not endorsed by or affiliated with Microsoft.

The video itself cannot be part of a subscription or pay-for-play website or part of an app that carries a fee. It can’t even appear on the same page as such items, even if they’re unrelated to the things being sold.

These rules apply for most of the properties owned by Microsoft, although not for Mojang’s Minecraft which already has its own guidelines set out, and some like Forza have some slight differences thanks to licenses for other content included.

If you want to read over the new policy in full, click the link here.