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.

The Sims 4 has been out a little while now, and although it released with nearly 90 things from previous games missing from the release version, some of that stuff has already been put back with some free updates. Now the career market for you little virtual people is about to expand out properly with the release of the first expansion for the game.

Titled “The Sims 4 Get to Work”, it will include a few more new career paths as well as the option to open up your own retail businesses. Among the added career paths are that of the Doctor, for the medically inclined; the Scientist, for discovery, silliness and science! and the Police path, so you can tackle crime if you want to rid the Sims streets of thieves and other criminals. Retail businesses can sell many different things and the shops can be designed like your typical Sims house, and I expect that to appeal to a number of fans of the game. Also, aliens are back. Not sure why they’re in a work expansion but I guess there must be some reason?

If you’re interested, Get to Work will appear in shops both real and virtual in April.

After having talked about implementing it for over a year now, saying that some barriers stood in the way of changes for a while (such as applying another unique identifier to accounts to make sure bans and whitelisting still worked), Mojang finally announced a few weeks ago that you would finally be able to change your displayed username for Minecraft accounts.

Today this update was rolled out halfway through the day, with a little change option being added to the pages of Mojang accounts everywhere. Many people have already managed to change their old usernames that no longer suited them to newer ones that better reflected themselves, so Mojang obviously did the bug testing before they rolled it out which is nice. Not to say that there won’t be at least one, but I do love to see a new feature work as advertised straight from the off.

Now all I have to do is regain access to my first Minecraft account again so I can change the username and use it for mischief… ¬u¬

A few days ago many users of Ubisoft’s Uplay client who had purchased some of their newest games from third-party retailers logged on to find that they no longer had access to their new games – mainly Far Cry 4. When they went searching for answers, Ubisoft and EA provided them with one – the keys in question had been bought with a stolen credit card and so had been deactivated. Now however Ubisoft have re-looked into the matter and decided that as the buyers were innocent victims in this case, they will reactivate keys for players who had already begun their journey into the game.

A representative told GameInformer by e-mail: “After further investigation into the matter of keys that were fraudulently purchased on EA’s Origin store, we are reinstating keys for consumers who already had successfully activated and started playing the games. Any remaining fraudulently obtained and resold keys have been deactivated.”

However Ubisoft have said they’ll be working closely with EA in future to stop such an event happening again and if it ever does, the keys that are deactivated are very likely to stay that way. They urged the players to remember that they could only trust purchases made from trusted retailers and shops such as Uplay and Steam, and that purchases made from other third-party retailers was made at their own risk. The two main third-parties who sold the keys were Kinguin and G2A and both made statements when it was discovered that the keys had been fraudulently obtained, stating that the seller had been an unknown Russian.

A few days ago, files that contained mods for the new Dying Light game were taken down from the places they were being shared thanks to some DMCA takedown notices that were served against them. Now the Entertainment Software Association has apologised for issuing them, saying that it was a mistake and that the requests were issued in error by a third-party vendor on behalf of the organisation.

Saturday was when the hosts of the mod files discovered that the modification files they had uploaded onto MediaFire had been taken down for violating the sharing site’s Terms of Service. The notices identified the ESA as the ones issuing the notices, and referred to “copyright infringment” also linking readers to an antipiracy website. All this despite the fact that the mods were nothing more than some visual alterations, so obviously there was some anger towards this action.

Around the same time the developer of the game Techland had released a patch that seemed to be designed to block the making of mods (a reference to how ‘cheating’ in the Be the Zombie PvP game mode by altering the game’s data files was now blocked), and now alterations to things in all gameplay modes was no longer possible. Many people linked the two events together due to the timing, suspecting that ESA member and publisher of Dying Light Warner Bros. was using the DMCA like a massive club to smack down the mod-making community of the game.

The ESA though has denied this, stating that the “ESA was notified this morning that potentially erroneous DMCA notices had been transmitted by one of its vendors. Upon further review, it was determined that the notices should not have been sent and retractions were issued immediately. We regret any inconvenience and have taken steps to avoid similar situations in the future.”

At the same time Techland have said that the effects of the new patch on single-player modification was an unintended side effect of their attempts to stop multiplayer cheating. They have said they’re working on a way to get modding restored as soon as possible.

“Creating obstacles for modders has never been our intention. We are now working on a quick patch that will re-enable common tweaks while stopping cheating in the game’s multiplayer mode.”