Nintendo’s new content creator program was announced a few days ago, to much controversy from Youtubers and their fans alike. While on first glance it seems like a good idea, on closer inspection it really isn’t…

Now Nintendo have announced the games they are whitelisting for the program, and notable among the games not on that list are the entire franchise of Pokemon games, the latest Bayonetta and one big Nintendo property – the entire series of Super Smash Bros.

While the first two can probably be explained away by the fact that they are third-party games and so Nintendo doesn’t have full rights to act over the monetisation of those videos, the Super Smash Bros one seems a bit odd at first. After all, it’s a full Nintendo-made game series. The problems come when you take into consideration that it too contains third-party characters (hey Pikachu!) and more than that – it’s a fighting game. That means it can be used for tournaments and the footage of those matches uploaded to Youtube, so Nintendo probably have some arrangements with partners to upload said content exclusively. Having other content creators monetising their content would possibly be in violation of this.

Nintendo’s Content Creators program was met with opposition when it became clear that Nintendo themselves were not only going to still take ad revenue some say they weren’t entitled to, but would also only split that revenue on videos they approved. As I said in my last article, journalistic integrity is already a problem on Youtube, and Nintendo would just make it so much worse this way.

Despite this, Nintendo reports that they’ve already been swamped with requests to sign up to the program.