T w e n t y S i d e d
Now that I’m producing video content, I’m thinking a lot about video game footage. Previously, I just smacked the screenshot key when I wanted to save a still image for the blog. Once in a while I’d save some important cutscenes. These days I need much better video coverage of the games I… uh… cover.
I also find I need footage of games I haven’t played in a few years. What happens if I’m writing a script and I suddenly realize I need footage from a cutscene near the end of Last of Us? I’d have to play through most of the game to get that. Or what if I need some footage of Fem Shepard with Ashley Williams during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, and all of my footage is of Male Shepard? I’d actually have to play all the way through BOTH of the first two games to get that footageThe default femshep gets Kaiden in ME2, which means you’d need to import a ME1 save.. What if I want to make a video on branching endings and I want to compare all the different endings of Dishonored 2? I’m pretty sure you’d need more than three trips through the game for that!
This can kill an essay. I don’t have time in my schedule to play 60 hours of a video game just to grab 2 minutes of relevant footage.
Maybe your first suggestion is to just quietly go over to YouTube, find a raw no-commentary LP, and download that. Well…
Laying aside ethical concernsIf someone used my game footage, I wouldn’t think of it as theft / copyright infringement. But the thing is, lots of people WOULD. Even if copyright / fair use is on your side, you REALLY don’t want to create bad blood and drama with a bunch of random YouTubers., this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lots of channels have watermarks, logos, or scattered popups with your typical “Like, Share, and Subscribe” calls to action. Also, unless there’s a secret site out there, all of the existing YouTube download tools are extremely sketchy, covered in the most questionableWe detected 10 billion viruses on your PC. Please download our totally safe and legitimate anti-virus and we’ll fix everything for free, we promise. sorts of ads, and are often extremely buggy and plagued by size limits that prevent you from getting large high-quality video files. (Which is certainly what you need if you’re trying to download gameplay footage, which is often posted in hour-long chunks.)
Taking it all together: Unless you’re talking about a AAA game from the last few years, then it’s going to be very difficult to find footage that:
- Features the game you need with good quality footage.
- Features the scenes / gameplay / playthrough style that suits your essay.
- Contains no watermarks or other distractions.
- Is part of an active channel where you can still contact the owner, and that owner is a reasonable person and not a random internet lunatic, and they will grant you permission to use their footage for freeOr for acknowledgement in the credits., and that the two of you can work out some way to exchange gigabytes worth of files, and they deliver on their end of the deal in a timely manner that doesn’t ruin your production schedule.
It seems like a simple thing, but a process like that could end up eating hours of time.
Also, footage takes up a lot of space. I’ve only got 1TB of data to worry about now, but it’s growing fast. The rate of growth will increase as resolutions and framerates climb. So what happens if I do this for another couple of years and I wind up needing to store 10TB of footage? That’s not cheap, particularly since you’d also want to have a backup somewhere so a drive failure won’t annihilate years of (practically) irreplaceable footage.
This is one of those things that seems like it should be super-simple, but turns out to be a massive pain in the ass.
So I was thinking… why isn’t there a way for video essayists to share their footage via Creative Commons? I’d gladly donate all of my collected footage if it meant I’d gain access to someone else’s footage. Heck, even if it was just two people, the system would still be a solid benefit to both of them. And the more people involved, the more useful it would be to everyone.
This idea seems so obvious that I assumed it must already exists somewhere, but various Google searches have turned up nothing.
Sadly, I don’t know how to set something like this up. I guess I could throw everything on an FTP somewhere, but I don’t know. Maybe there’s a better way of doing it.
I mentioned on the podcast last week that I was replaying Tomb Raider 2013. I spent about three hours with the game so I could grab ONE CUTSCENE, and I’m still not there yet. (I thought this scene happened way sooner in the game, and now I’m stuck riding the sunk cost fallacy to my ruin.)
I know there are sites out there where you can share and download freeOr for link / attribution. stock photos, textures, models, source code, libraries, and even games. But nothing for gameplay footage. I realize gameplay footage is a bit of a niche need – the number of video game video essayists in the world can’t be more than a few thousand, and there are probably less than a hundred with this particular need. I understand why nobody has been crazy enough to build a business around this, but it seems like something someone, somewhere should have created by now, even if it’s just a Discord and an FTP.
The other possibility is that maybe I should just hold off making more videos until I have a large enough footage library. The videos are doing well, but they’re not driving a lot of traffic to the site, which is the whole point. I don’t know.
Anyway, it’s an interesting problem that I thought would make for good discussion.
Bonus discussion: How often do average non-critics, non-streamers actually care about capturing footage? I see lots of games with built-in recording and capturing features, and it always feels weird to me. Do people really use that stuff?
Footnotes:
[1] The default femshep gets Kaiden in ME2, which means you’d need to import a ME1 save.
[2] If someone used my game footage, I wouldn’t think of it as theft / copyright infringement. But the thing is, lots of people WOULD. Even if copyright / fair use is on your side, you REALLY don’t want to create bad blood and drama with a bunch of random YouTubers.
[3] We detected 10 billion viruses on your PC. Please download our totally safe and legitimate anti-virus and we’ll fix everything for free, we promise.
[4] Or for acknowledgement in the credits.
[5] Or for link / attribution.
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More than once I’ve arrived to a weird bug or funny event in a game and I would have wished to have recorded it. The PS4’s “save the last few minutes of gameplay to video” feature is perfect for that. Otherwise, capturing footage is useful for LP’s.
As for your main issue, you could probably contact other people to play the games for you so you can engage in other tasks while someone gets the footage you need. Granted, you’d likely have to compensate them somehow. Throw a few bucks their way or some special mention, or maybe a copy of the game if they don’t already own it.
You could put these jobs on a place like Mechanical Turk! :D
I used the PS4’s share features to capture some goofy Fallout 4 videos, like a Deathclaw getting trapped in a hole in the ground, or Maxson floating helplessly above the ruins of the Institute, or the ‘I am Shawn’ cutscene.
I also used it in conjunction with No Man’s Sky’s screenshot feature to get the perfect picture of a procedurally-generated giant luchador chicken. Good times.
On the “stealing footage” thing ive always assumed that as long as content creators link any footage used in the description nobody would kick up a fuss? or is there a kinda unwrritten law where you contact the content creator to ask to use their gameplay in your video? also on the capturing footage thing i personally just take screen shots and if i wanna show my Gf or any other friends a game ill just stream it over discord. Ive never really seen a need to capture footage since none if my gameplay is likely to make a form of “play of the week” even if theres only 10 players playing that game worldwide id still not make the top ten.
Maybe not an unwritten law, but certainly a professional courtesy. Most youtubers are reasonable people who themselves understand how difficult it is to navigate the frustrating and labyrinthine world of copyright law. I think most would be fine with a few second clips, or a few screenshots. I see no reason why you wouldn’t spend a few minutes messaging someone and you don’t want to be in a situation where you end up having your video claimed because of a few seconds of footage. You never know if someone’s going to be an asshole, and they probably won’t, but it’s not a bad thing to make sure.
The issue with using other peoples’ footage without compensation, is that it took work for them to make it. If you use very little of it[1], it’s not the most noteworthy / interesting parts[2], ask them first, and/or give them credit, the more likely they are to be OK with it. However, a lot of commentary focuses on the interesting parts of games[3], so that makes it all the more important to ask first, give credit, and use small amounts.
[1] Let’s say, a few seconds, compared to the hour-long let’s-play they uploaded to YouTube.
[2] Like, you use a weird scene in a side-quest, crop it to focus on a minor character instead of the protagonist, etc.
[3] From Shamus’ description, a good portion of his work would count here.
There’s also the freedom of association stuff; some people don’t want to be associated with other people in any capacity. I expect that’s probably more common with the game publishers than the streamers, but still something to keep in mind.
There is a written law – copyright.
In Berne Convention countries (most of the world):
In the absence of an explicit contract saying otherwise*, all content you create is automatically owned by you, to do with as you see fit.
You can decide that anyone can do whatever they want, require them to mention you in their credits (eg CC BY), require them to also give away their derivitive works (GPL), say they can only use it for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC), require them to pay you large amounts of money (most commercial licences), or anything in between.
Your work, your choice.
So in order to use someone else’s content to create your own, you need their permission. They may have given permission up-front, or you may need to ask.
(There are specific exceptions to this, such as parody, but these vary by jurisdiction)
* Employment contracts and hire contracts usually include clauses assigning the employer copyright over anything you create ‘at work’.
Some employment contracts try to claim copyright over everything you create at all – that is the only true “copyright theft”.
Exactly how copyright applies to recorded footage of a video game is VERY murky legal territory, though. Did the person playing/recording the game CREATE that piece of footage, or did they merely copy someone ELSE’S copywritten product? Is a recording of gameplay footage equivalent to taping a theater screening of a new movie (infringement), or like painting alterations onto a print of someone else’s art (fair use)? Reasonable arguments can be made in support of either position.
If it’s like neither one, then it occupies an undefined middle that has no standard in law. And until new law is established to fill that space in, either through legislation or court precedent, the legal status is going to remain unclear.
youtube-dl is an amazing tool if you should resort to finding content on YouTube: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/
It took me years to find youtube-dl and JDownloader, despite having been downloading YT videos on a semi-regular basis for over half a decade.
It really says something about the state of Google that I could keep searching for “youtube downloader” and “youtube downloading software” for years and only find the actually decent non-ad-ridden program(s) by word-of-mouth.
(Also there’s 3D Youtube Downloader, which I found on http://www.portablefreeware.com, which is an excellent website I cannot recommend strongly enough.)
For all your youtube-downloading needs: youtube-dl.
EDIT: Dang, ninja’d. But that should tell you how good it is.
Yes I know CLI apps aren’t sexy, but it’s literally the best downloader for any video site out there. And if you really need a gui, there is one, conveniently named “youtube-dl-gui”.
That one being https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui
YDL is good stuff. It will let you download 2160p video (if it exists), although anything above 720 needs to be downloaded as separate elemental streams due to the way Youtube stores HD stuff. But if you want screenshots, audio is unnecessary anyway.
Doesn’t YDLG no longer work? I thought Youtube changed its encryption and so you have to use the CLI version.
I’ve been using Video DownloadHelper[1] for Firefox, which works reasonably well, although you need to install an extra codec for high-res videos[2]. YoutubeDL sounds way more convenient, and has a few more options too! :)
[1] This is the dumbest capitalization and spacing I’ve seen for a name of software. ^^;
[2] at least in Linux, I think…
I have that too. I can’t even remember where I found it or what it was for in the first place. It does what I want (save a random small video, not just from youtube) but I don’t know how it handles anything bigger. The extra codec thing happens on Windows too.
I’ve been using that for years, but it was hit hard by the security changes to Firefox, and I think I’ll try YDL to compare.
Can it handle queued downloads? I’ve been using Ant Video Downloader for years and my biggest problem is there’s no way to queue up a bunch of videos and not have it try and download them all at once.
With Youtube-DL, you can download playlists. So you can create a custom private playlist with the videos you want to download then give that to Youtube-DL.
Oh, nice!
You can create a list of URLs in a text file, then tell youtube-dl to read the URLs from that.
secon^H^H^H^H^Hthirding the suggestion for youtube-dl
Seconding the assumption that so long as you source the footage you’re using you should be in the clear. All the “controversies” I’ve ever seen were always when people take footage and don’t source the one who took it. This includes Yong Yea when he took someone else’s footage of a plain title screen. That’s it. May as well source everything.
As for all these niche streaming features I hate them. Anyone who consistently captures footage will always use an outside program like OBS because it’s consistent, can be used with every game, and they know it. Having a game with “special game capture provided” is just a pointless hassle for them. My biggest problem are developers adding in “streamer friendly” versions of the game. Recently LRR played through Control and there’s lots of music which can be copyright claimed so they have a version where if you play in “streamer mode” they don’t play it. Great so because Youtube makes it easy for people to be struck with a copyright strike we the viewers now get to experience a worse version of the game. And don’t even get me started with the crap with Kingdom Hearts where if you’re on streamer version they blocked out cutscenes so it wasn’t spoilers. Or when Atlas threatened streamers to not stream Persona 5 beyond whatever event because of spoiler reasons and if they did they’d take their videos down. Scummy companies trying to dictate how people can play and consume their games. Perfect.
I’m totally unaware of the situation but now I’m wondering, how do you tell someone else has used your plain title screen footage?
They switched out pixels in various parts of the screen that spell “Red-Handed” in Morse Code.
…or maybe just cursor movements, I dunno.
I think making a “streamer friendly” version of a game is not something that we should hold against developers. To be clear I agree with you that the abuse of copyright provisions is a problem, just that developers are not making it worse by giving people the option to work around it.
As an additional bit of trivia, Dream Daddy has a concert sequence that involves a minigame to a song which I think they were worried could get stricken down by copyright, so for their stream friendly version they had an actual alternate track that went on how “you would hear a song here but you’re hearing this instead because it won’t be muted” or something along those lines.
The thing is we’re living in the future and there are a lot of conveniences like say digital downloads. Physical media isn’t as prevalent anymore and yet we have developers going “You know what we really need? We need to add to our game. And yeah let’s just get the license for 5 years. There’s no way our game will still be on shelves in 5 years that’s crazy.” 5 years pass. “O hey our license has expired and what? Our game is STILL on store shelves? Well that’s insanity. Our only option is to remove the game from all storefronts or else we’ll get sued.” So goodbye Deadpool, goodbye Alan Wake, goodbye Lego: The Hobbit (though I think this one is movie rights).
The point is we’ve gotten to this stupid point where some devs are gimping their game for streaming purposes but are still making the same mistakes that can very easily get their games removed from all storefronts in X years. If I was a developer I’d look at it and go hmm do I spend a bunch of money on a license and even more money to implement a streamer friendly option or do I have our current sound and music department make another song. In my mind the answer should be obvious but then again what do I know. Maybe those songs in Control are essential to the gameplay experience.
Something I genuinely don’t understand: Movies that use copyrighted songs in the soundtrack seem to get to use them in perpetuity. I’ve never heard of a film having music stripped out because they lost the licence. Why is it any different for games?
Generally, movies are made by companies rich enough and legally-savvy enough to get such provisions into whatever licensing contract. Even then, Hollywood’s not immune: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomeVersionSoundtrackReplacement
Removal of songs for licensing reasons happens with DVD releases of TV shows all the time. Because of my very specific fannish preferences, the ones I can cite offhand are Beverly Hills 90210 (where it really ruined some episodes, unfortunately) and Daria, but someone else could probably give examples in other genres.
I am restraining myself from giving the Very Long Rant about copyright law, remixing, and lack of compulsory licensing that makes me so very fun at parties. (My deep knowledge of Beverly Hills 90210 trivia ALSO makes me very fun at parties. I can’t imagine why I am not invited to more parties, really…)
Basically, before the DVD era it didn’t occur to anyone that TV series would have a market on home video. VHS cassettes were originally pretty expensive and you could only fit 3 or 4 episodes of an hour-long drama on one tape–not very practical for your typical 22 episode season of a primetime drama. So when songs were licensed for TV programs, they bought the license in perpetuity (most likely with some kind of royalty deal), but it would be broadcast rights only. This usually doesn’t apply to music like the score composed specifically for the series, which would be considered work-for-hire and thus owned by the production company afterwards; this was for existing pop songs and the like that get inserted into a TV or film production (“needle drops” seems to be the common term these days).
When DVDs made TV series viable for the home video market, newer series of course negotiated to include home video rights for any music included. Or in the case of say, shows on the WB Network, all the songs featured were by artists signed to Warner Music, a division of the same corporate parent (Time Warner), so securing the home video rights was a matter of shuffling some paperwork around. But when releasing older series on DVD, any songs that had been licensed for broadcast didn’t have home video rights. So a distributor had to weigh a few options for each song:
1) Renegotiate home video rights with the rights-holder (e.g. the artist, publisher, and/or label) and hope they’re not a greedy dick about it.
2) Negotiate rights to a different song that fits well enough, and hope that rights-holder isn’t a greedy dick about it.
3) Commission entirely new music, which might be expensive but at least you probably don’t have to pay royalties later.
4) Substitute some music you already own or some public domain/creative commons/library music.
All these options cost time and money and that has to be weighed against projected sales, and all the options but 1 threaten to undermine the impact of the original song’s use and placement. So, something like Star Trek the Original Series which has no licensed music can be rereleased without issue on that front. But something like the boomer-nostalgia drama The Wonder Years, with its heavy use of classic 60s & 70s rock songs, had to clear 285 songs (and I don’t even know if that’s every song actually used in the original broadcasts), plus the use of Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help From My Friends”, the series’ theme song, for every episode. It took years for the whole series to be released on DVD because of this.
Unrelated to the main topic, but am I the only one who despises Joe Cocker’s cover of “With a Little Help From My Friends”?
Oh in terms of “streamer mode” it’s not about the license expiring or anything like that, that prevents the game distribution. It’s about overzealous algorithms hunting your LP of the game on YouTube forcing you to dispute (repeated) copyright claims and messing up with your monetization. These things don’t care that the music is a 1min bit in your 20min video of the game that you legally own.
As for Dream Daddy specifically the band actually makes a cameo in the game (well, their likeness is used) and I think they’re somewhat indie so I’m fairly certain this was about the automated algorithms that a distributor from a given country might insist upon rather than the musician themselves hunting the devs down. Which on some level only shows further how much the system is messed up.
I realize that what I’m saying is that they’re spending time and money implementing these “features” so that people can stream without getting hit with copyright strikes but they’re still shelling out money for song licenses that can remove their product from sale in 5 or 10 years. It costs them nothing to have a game on a digital storefront forever. It would be simpler and arguably cheaper for them to ignore getting licensed songs altogether. Then there’s no need for any streamer mode, no need to worry over copyright strikes, and you also don’t have to deal with losing the right to sell your own game down the line.
The use of a licensed song is a creative decision just like every other one. I think your solution is MUCH more extreme than a streamer mode. I’m kind of baffled you’d suggest it, honestly.
I admit it’s an extreme decision but on the whole is it really such a bad thing? The vast majority of games don’t use licensed songs and they don’t seem to have any problems. The last games I’ve played off the top of my head that have used licensed music would probably be Fallout 3 and I guess Saints Row? The question it comes down to is whether or not these licensed songs are essential to the game experience. In something like Fallout, yes get the licensed songs. They clearly have a purpose and are there to deal with immersion. Saints Row and GTA (which I haven’t played) is a bit tougher since I’m not sure just how much them having radio stations that play real songs helps matters. In both those cases however the music is optional so a streamer wouldn’t have a problem streaming the game. Just don’t use the radio. But for something like Control? Are the songs they’re licensing crucial to the experience? I’ll be honest I don’t know. I haven’t played it and the Let’s Play LRR went through had the songs removed so how important could they really be? If I’m a game developer and I put in a licensed song but then also put in a mode to remove said song if someone is streaming, how important is this song to my product anyway?
Only AA or AAA studios can afford to use licensed music. As far as I can tell only AAA studios have successfully gotten a license to use the music in perpetuity. And the question is how many of these songs were chosen for “creative” purposes and not just because they want to have a song people know and is impressive thrown in? Halo 2 had Blow Me Away by Breaking Benjamin in the game and Halo 3 had a song by Hoobastank. But if you ask anyone what song from Halo they know they’ll end up humming the Halo Theme. If you were to ask me which piece I believe to be more creative then I’d obviously say the Halo Theme. Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if some higher ups liked Breaking Benjamin and Hoobastank and decided to get their songs into the game because they could, not because it improves the product creatively.
It just baffles me that some game dev can go “I NEED this song in my game for my creative vision. Let’s go through all the proper channels, get our lawyers involved, and pay a butt ton of money for it. Now let’s spend even more money to make a mode of the game where I completely eradicate my essential creative vision so that streamers can play it without worry. I am a creative genius.”
Yep, it’s kind of insane.
“Oh, we wanted to have a scene where the characters sing along to a nostalgic pop song that the audience knows so they feel close to them, and maybe sing along too”
“Nah, screw that, we’ll get the in house composer to do it, even though it will not make sense at all”. The in house guy also owns all his stuff in perpetuity and to save money they only licensed it for the projected first party sale period of the title, so without making the right contract they have EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM. I’m starting to think this dude doesn’t understand copyright law.
What they need to do is to have the rights to the material which will cover sales in perpetuity, not for a limited period. However, as things like independent films, television, and video games, are all relatively new mediums, their preservation has not always been a priority. Films like Dog Soldiers or Event Horizon literally have had the original negatives lost, in the first case for the ENTIRE FILM and the second for the footage to make a better director’s cut. That prevents any sort of HD rerelease with remastering, because they are stuck working from the theatrical prints. They used to just get rid of old TV shows, much of Doctor Who was at one point, almost lost. Wasn’t worth the fire hazard of storing thousands of episodes of TV, nor the space. Videogames were assumed to die with the consoles-why would you bother licensing music for a game on a console when that console isn’t going to be sold in 5 years? You license it for 5 years, since you’ll only be selling it for that time. Budget is king. A better call would be “Don’t license anything that you can’t deal with in the long term”.
And Streamer mode isn’t even to do with that. It’s to do with copyright bots, and well, deal with it bub. It’s not much a worse experience for you, anymore than getting your game by having someone play it for you and talk over it is. It’s not the dev’s fault or the streamer’s it’s to do with the platform and the platform has no interest in fixing it. In the meantime, Stremer mode saves streamers from dealing with copyright bots, which the devs and publishers can’t always easily deal with thanks to the volume of trolls and scammers-and can’t deal with AT ALL for licensed material. If you’re complaining that playing a game while streaming or getting a game’s story from a stream isn’t the purest way to experience the game, well. Duh.
I’m glad you decided to be so antagonistic about this but I think you’re the one who’s confused here. First off I can’t think of a single game in which there’s a sing-along number though I wouldn’t be surprised if one exists in the children section or something. Maybe Disney Infinity? In which case it doesn’t matter anyway because if they have the music rights they also have the Disney character rights and ALSO ALSO I’m pretty sure Disney owns the studio that made Disney Infinity (just checked yep they do what a surprise). Also why can’t an in house composer make a song that becomes catchy and makes people want to sing along to? Here’s looking at you Mordin Solus from Mass Effect. Or again, the Halo Theme which pretty much everyone knows.
Secondly as for who owns the rights that’s questionable. A lot of indie and maybe even AA game companies might outsource their music and allow in the contract for the creator to maintain the rights to any music produced for use in the game. It makes it easier on the wallets of those game companies. It also happened to bite one game in the butt when the composer Alex Mauer went insane and started copyright striking said game’s trailers and got it pulled from the Steam page even though there was a contract in place allowing them to use the music. That being said do you honestly think for one second the EA and Ubisoft does not hold the rights to all the music created to be used in their games? Of course they do. That would be locked into all employee contracts. This goes as far back as the early 2000s. I checked Halo and while it seems either 343 or Microsoft now owns those rights there is a provision that states “the music from Halo 3 is available for your use in non-profit ventures thanks to an arrangement with O’Donnell/Salvatori, Inc., composers of this iconic theme”. So O’Donnell may have gotten it written into his contract where he retains some rights but no one will see the contract so specifics are unclear.
Also as for streamer mode I personally think it’s stupid, good for you for not caring I guess but that response was me making light of the idiocy that would be a game dev caring so much for their vision they wanted to go through all the extra hassle of adding in a song that would cost the company a lot of money to license, especially since they’ll need to license it forever. And then develop a system that blocks that song from playing while streamed thereby compromising the original artistic vision to begin with. It’s backwards and stupid. If they added in the song then just let the strikes happen to people who stream that’s fine but the fact that they would add it only to then remove it for a small segment of the playerbase is ridiculous. Literally more cost effective and worthwhile to get another song produced by your in house music department.
Not being allowed to play licensed music in the background is something that’s existed for far longer than youtube.
Automatic algorithmic enforcement with no appeal, no sense, and frequently no clarity on exactly what the standard for infringement is or how you violated it is, however, new and pioneered by YouTube.
Fair use is a real legal thing. YouTube completely ignores it and tramples on the legal rights of its content providers.
No, it doesn’t. It’s not a right, that’s how they do it. You don’t understand.
Fair use is a real thing. It’s an exemption that can be argued against an allegation of infringement. IT IS NOT: A LEGAL RIGHT. IT IS NOT: IMMUNITY TO BEING SUED.
It’s the argument you’ll rely on court if Warner Bros for instance, decides to take you there.
What it means, is that if you are taken to court for copyright infringement, you can argue that it is fair use, and the judge will make a ruling in your favor or not, and if in your favor, that charge will be dismissed. That is all.
I’ve literally seen people sued over this stupid internet urban legend. One dingus used part of a soundtrack, the majority of it, as background for their video, talking about the film. Got sued, because they didn’t own the rights, had no deal for them. They contested it, thinking it was transformative. However, using background music as background music and just changing what is being said over it isn’t transformative at all, the music was copyrighted. So the rights holders sued them. Because that’s the next step.
Youtube’s process isn’t a legal process at all. It’s a private process. So if you’re saying “Rights” you’re already in the wrong ballpark. What Youtube is doing is offering a private arbitration process for taking down copyrighted content. They do this, because having a mechanism is required to not be responsible themselves. They automate this, because they do not want to PAY to properly arbitrate it and come to a fair conclusion. As a private platform, it is their absolute right to delete ANY video uploaded, and they exercise that right widely, and always favor the copyright holders, because it’s in their best interests, and it’s cheaper.
It’s bad, and unfair. It is not an ideal system at all. But nobody’s rights are being violated, and “Fair Use” does not mean what Doug Walker fans think it does. Youtube only has to offer “Fair Use” as far as they care to run the risk, because when Youtube deems useage “Fair Use”, they are not a court, they are not a judge. If they decide something is “Fair Use” they’re saying “We also think this is probably fair use and are willing to take the risk”. You can see why the answer is usually no there now? They can literally ban you for any reason, and not a single one of your rights will have been violated, because THAT’S NOT WHAT RIGHTS ARE.
Again, not good, very bad system, but it is a system and it’s a lot more complicated than “Where’s the fair use, I have a LEGAL RIGHT to upload my videos talking over copyrighted works onto your PRIVATE PLATFORM”
Who on earth is going to copyright claim over Poets of the Fall? I don’t believe anybody actually listens to them outside of Remedy games. Unless there’s some “people who think Theory of a Deadman are a bit too hard-rocking” demographic I was previously unaware of.
Seconding an assumption is really not helpful when it comes to legal shit.
“Oh, this forumite said that as long as I gave attribution it’d be good, and some people agreed” doesn’t help you with a takedown of any kind, and still leaves you wondering whether to take down and re-edit the video. And if you’re working professionally, like Shamus is, then it’s even more of a quagmire.
That’s why he mentioned Creative Commons. CC licensing is very specific, and tells you exactly what your due dilligence is, which is often just attribution BECAUSE the other party has already agreed to it.
“most questionable[3] sorts of ads,” … and we really ARE Microsoft, promise promise cross my heart and hope to die …even if you are on a FruityCo laptop
Recording in-game footage might be useful for submitting bug reports. But by and large I don’t really care for it and I think the developer time could be spent on better things. Especially as I’m sure most dedicated video game video creators have their own toolchains in place.
This won’t be a comprehensive solution, but could the use of cheat engine help you to skip or expedite chunks of gameplay that stand between you and what you were looking to capture? And rather than a creative commons of video (which would be storage/bandwidth heavy), what about a common repository of game saves/states?
+1 for a repository of game save-files. Especially if everyone included a little text file that explained where exactly the files need to go for each game, for each operating system, that could work very well.
As for a shared video-hosting thing – it could still maybe work, but it would be tricky. Since these videos don’t need to be streamed live (you’re using them to edit together other videos, not watching them as let’s-plays), that would alleviate some of the bandwidth problems. You’d probably want some kind of auto-screenshot / auto-thumbnail feature, so people can browse through the videos quickly without having to completely download them first. Hosting would be pretty dang expensive, but could maybe work with a system built on top of BitTorrent (or a newer / better) file-sharing protocol, where you agree to keep your own copies / hosting for specific videos, games, or genres of your choosing.
Of course, those are only the technical challenges. The non-technical problems would be ensuring nobody uploads / hosts illegal videos, the videos don’t violate game-companies policies / otherwise call down a fleet of lawyers, and spam / malware files don’t clog up the system. It’s possible, but would be difficult to do.
Regarding save game files, I know there’s a website with lot of endgame ME 1 and ME 2 save files, so that players can start the next games in the series with whatever choices they wanted. There’s also a website with dozens of saves for the PS1-era Tomb Raider games (like 10 per levels) , I used it a few months ago when I lost my save. So some repositories of save files exist, but it’s not widespread.
And then you’ve got cheat codes, cheat engine and save files editing if those are available on the game you’re interested in.
Yeah was gonna say, with Mass Effect in particular there’s great save editing tools to just tweak.. everything. The point in the story you’re at, what choices you’ve made, who’s alive, etc. Borderlands is another that’s pretty easy to modify, always ended up doing it when playing coop since my buddies were so much further ahead than me, had to bump the character level a bit every once in a while.
For video hosting you could always set up a PeerTube instance.
LoL, OK I guess somebody solved all those technical problems and bundled it up into a nice little package / name. ^^;
There are already some websites for sharing game save files, for games like The Witcher and Mass Effect. But most of these are full runs/completed games with the purpose of being imported into the next game in the series (ME1 to ME2, Witcher to Witcher 2, etc).
Still, they can give you a head start and solve one of your problems (needing a ME1 save with FemShep and Ashley to import into ME2)
It’s worth noting that the internet archive already has a collection for videogame replays – https://archive.org/details/game_replays .
It (unsurprisingly) skews significantly to older games, and the quality of the videos varies widely, but the collection could be used as a starting point for building out a more useful collection for critical essays.
I’m surprised Shamus didn’t bring Internet Archive up, I’m sure he’s gone on about them at length in the past, no?
I just googled my way to this site. Could it be an alternative?
http://www.savegameworld.com
Hah! Asdasd, your suggestion was so good, somebody already built it! ^^;
There are some very specialized repositories around:
https://www.masseffectsaves.com
(for ME1. For ME2 they’ve got “masseffect2saves.com”)
Not video footage, but I collect a lot of screenshots for use as a slideshow screensaver. I love it when games make it easy to do that, by hiding UIs and the like.
I am a compulsive screenshotter so i also have a lot of games’screenshots. I also bought a 1080p capture device a couple of years ago with the intent of video editing but just did not have the time due to work.
I’ve mostly used it for just a couple of games but i can start recording more.
Shamus, I had previously mentioned maybe crowd sourcing this sort of thing from your audience as a way of saving time. It seems to me that if you’re willing to use footage from YouTube, you’d be fine with using it from your audience too.
I actually have a NAS that could be connected as an ftp server. If you wanted, we could it set up for sharing… though the usable space is only 3TB at the moment. It has drive redundancy (RAID 0) but no actual backup. The offer is there if you’d like.
Oops, I meant to write RAID 1… drive mirroring.
Regarding Mass Effect, one way to avoid those full playthroughs just for a single clip is to save before what you want and to use a save editor to flip the gender! Mass Effect, AFAIK, had a pretty robust and useful tool to do it!
edit: ah, someone suggested it above already while my window lay open for a long time.
I think this is at least part of the reason why the big analytical video reviews Ilike watching often take months to come out. Regardless of playing and writing, just filming and recording looks like it takes a lot of time. I wanna say I’ve read Matthewmatosis say at some point that he’s perfectly fine with people using his footage, and I think it’s at least partially the use for the Longplay channels out there, but obviously I’ve never had to do that myself.
I use the share features on PS4 and Switch pretty often. Especially when I first got a PS4, I thought it was novel to post my own gameplay clips to youtube, and it’s nice to have my own screenshots on hand if I’m ever writing a blog post or something somewhere. It’s not an ideal method, natch. The compression isn’t great and the service can’t be trusted to last. For one, you could never easily just transfer these images to your own computer, not without a USB or SD card or something anyway. But additionally, PS4 quit whatever deal it had with Facebook a while back, and Switch hasn’t been able to connect to it for weeks. To get my screenshots from Link’s Awakening out there, I had to post them to Twitter, and then instantly save the images and delete the posts so it won’t bother someone. That can all be frustrating.
Still, I value the ability to capture stupid Dragon Age glitches as they happen to me. That’s cathartic. And even when nobody but me and maybe a couple friends watch them, I think putting up some scenes I liked or funny gameplay I did is a pretty fun little thing to have as a side dish to the game. I would miss it.
BTW Let me know if you need some sweet ps4 compression Dragon Age Inquisition glitches, Dark Souls 3, Dragon’s Crown or Half-Genie Hero boss runs, Street Fighter 5 bronze league matches or footage of that Robot from Grow Home falling down from the heighest possible point of the game, that’s about what I can contribute lol
I don’t really see a big issue with nicking footage from walkthroughs, as long as you have the creator’s name displayed in the corner (I’ve seen it done quite a lot, even by people of you channel’s size). But I can see two big reasons why people haven’t set up something like this yet:
– Video essayists don’t have much contact between each other, apart from the odd Twitter thread, so probably no one wants to bother being the one who sets it up and promotes it among the various channel creators
– Some essayists might view such a Discord server as grounds for someone stealing their ideas for videos – e.g. if you know what footage a given creator is looking for, then you could probably guess what topic he plans on covering. I personally don’t think this would be a problem, but I can definitely see creators worrying about this kind of stuff
If you don’t want to be the one to set this thing up, I think it’s a good idea to just use whatever footage you wish, and give credit for it, like most creators are currently doing. If somebody makes a fuss, chances are some YouTuber’s going to cover it, the news is going to spread like wildfire, and a system like this will be set up by someone else. These things are a bit like laws – most people start thinking about setting up a procedure once somebody gets hurt.
The only benefit I see is for games that rely on user- and procedurally-generated content, where the idea of such a feature is for people to share all the crazy shenanigans they’ve gotten up to. A famous example is Slime Rancher (you can even see the creator talking about its benefits here). I think Noita has a similar feature, but I haven’t played it, so don’t quote me on that :D
The problem I see with nicking footage – as someone who is totally outside this issue, being neither a reviewer or a player of the games Shamus is talking about, nor a producer or consumer on YouTube – is that as Shamus described, it takes a significant investment of resources (time, server space) to produce the footage he’s talking about. It seems reasonable to want someone to at least ask before using your work. Although of course there may be cultural norms of which I wouldn’t be aware.
And of course, Shamus doesn’t want to go “It’s probably fine, they probably don’t care” and then have some trouble later.
It needs to be a little more sure than that to be LEGAL, let alone to deal with Youtube’s overzealous copyright detection system, which has about zero care when it comes to working out the nuance of the situation.
You need a lot more certainty to be good with the first one, and then even more to deal with the second.
Noita automatically records the last minute or so of gameplay so that it can do death replays and “something cool just happened, let me push the clip button to save that”. Its best feature is that it exports to gif so you can share it more easily and widely than if it uploaded a real video file.
It’s weird, Noita was my game of the year and my hard drive probably contains a hundred gifs of wacky physics and improbable deaths, but I didn’t even think of the feature until seeing your comment mention it. It’s not part of the core experience to me, just something that lets me send crazyNoitaRicochet.gif to my friends, as insubstantial as sharing a picture of a cute kitten I saw on the internet. I’d say something about word of mouth advertising, but I convinced all my friends to buy Noita before I even found the option to toggle on video recording.
What you just described is basically the wet dream of every advertiser and marketing expert. Even if a majority of your users don’t share these GIFs on social media, having them share your product between each other means that they think about and discuss it even when they aren’t using it.
This means that users are engaged with said product for longer, even in places and at times where they can’t use it*, giving you a foothold into their valuable headspace, making them more likely to buy other things from you.
Of course, all of that requires you to have a good product to begin with, but that’s beside the point.
*E.g. at work, when they receive a GIF from a friend playing Noita, prompting them to think “Hey, that build looks fun! I should probably play some Noita when I get back home, rather that that other game I was thinking about!”
All that is less useful when you’re an indie shop with one game instead of a corporate juggernaut with a dozen games in the franchise and premium coffee mugs with your IP on them, but I guess that’s an even better explanation than “more resources to develop it” for why sharability features seem to show up mostly in AAA games.
Came down here to mention Noita’s in-built GIF-saver feature as well, since I’ve been playing it obsessively since Christmas. It’s my first experience with such a feature, but it’s so, so useful. Especially in a game like Noita where the really cool moments are just that, moments out of potentially hours-long playthroughs where I wouldn’t want to record the whole thing then pick through the footage afterwards.
I’ve definitely seen videos with other people’s names up on screen but do you know the creator didn’t ask those people first? I’m think I’ve heard people like Jim Sterling and Angry Joe make references to them asking.
You could always just stream everything on YouTube or Twitch, and let them archive your streams.
10TB of storage won’t set you back all that much either, it’ll probably end up costing $400-500 to set up a NAS with 10TB in RAID1, cheaper with good deals and/or 2nd hand components.
Although Twitch only saves up to 3 months of videos, last I heard.
I only watch some of the LRR crew, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a constant. Their main channel has months of vod backlog, but Adamn’s home stream looks like it has less (though that might just be ’cause he’s only one person), and Cameron’s stream doesn’t have any vods (which might be because they’re turned off, or because he doesn’t stream enough to warrant vod capacity.
TieTuesday’s Twitch looks like it still has everything from the last three years.
I believe it differs based on whether you’re just a rando streamer or a Twitch partner (or the other thing).
As an alternative to relevant video, perhaps you could search for relevant save game data? Maybe hitting up friends lists on Steam? Maybe there’s a forum somewhere?
When developers mention those features, it always sounds like they got a memo that social media integration is important, so they put in a feature that lets them say the words “And you can share it with your friends!” in an E3 announcement. It’s hard to describe exactly what gives me this vibe, but it seems like such an exercise in box-checking, like the old trend of how every FPS from Bioshock to Spec Ops: The Line needed to have a tacked-on multiplayer mode.
People definitely use the in game screenshot tools for games. You see pictures from them on r/gaming all the time.
I use JDownloader 2 to download YouTube videos all the time. No size limits.
JDownloader is bar none the best tool for the job.
Clean, quick, free, usually caps your Internet speed (as opposed to online downloaders which are slow), virtually unlimited queueing and even allows you to download full playlists.
As a bonus, it’s a semi-universal download manager so it works with almost anything: most video sites (if you know it by name it’s almost certain to work), but also pictures, audios, archives, really any kind of file if a direct link can be detected from the source code when you copy the URL.
God-like downloading powers even though anyone can figure it out without tutorial. If you never used it, just try it for like 5 minutes and witness the magic.
You are overreacting in two regards:
1) There are functional websites where you can download/convert YouTube videos. Just because they have ads it doesn’t mean they are malicious and have viruses. I have used many of them during the last ten years and they get the job done. I couldn’t suggest a specific one because I haven’t memorized any of them, I just Google “Youtube download” and go for whatever results I am presented with.
2) 99% of YouTubers are fine with simply mentioning that the footage is theirs in your video description. You don’t have to explicitly contact them for their permission. All incidents involving YouTube drama with stolen footage have clear mentions that all this could have been avoided by proper accreditation in the description, nothing more.
Unless there’s a disclaimer in the description of their video, yes you do. It’s better to ask permission than beg forgiveness.
The first is true.
The second is not. Just because previous drama has been over attribution, does not mean that everyone, will always, be happy with everyone, using their footage. They may want to deny it for the simple reason of not liking you-then you have drama. They may want to deny it because they don’t want to share it.
What you want is something that is legally sound. Like say, a piece of footage which is licensed under creative commons, meaning you HAVE the rights and you KNOW the stipulations for useage.
And I’m guessing absent that, Shamus would rather know the legality of the matter, and how Youtube would treat the situation, because that’s what’s going to determine what happens to his videos, his work, rather than “I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be right”
Yeah, ever since I began recording footage I have find myself frequently purchasing external hard drives to store gameplay footage. At first I tried to record footage of every game I played, but this swiftly became unreasonable. My dream is to one day just have a RAID or something that I can shuffle all my stuff onto.
I use the “record last 30 seconds” button on my Switch every so often to catch cutscenes I like or random impressive gameplay feats. Screenshots are great for the sort of puzzles where you’d usually need to write something down, though it’s a little awkward to navigate back and forth from screenshots to game. I have shown my screenshots to other people precisely twice, both times because I encountered an NPC with the same name as one of my friends.
On PC, I use the integrated Warframe screenshot tool precisely because it attaches debug information for the bug I’m reporting when I want to take a screenshot.
I use the screenshot tool on the Switch all the time. Not on purpose, mind you — I’m reaching for the minus button on a Pro Controller and hit it by mistake. I have no idea how many pointless images are saved on that thing by now.
Maybe create a Google GSuite account at the business level so you get unlimited storage and the ability to create unlimited shared drives. You can make a shared drive for the game in particular, and share access for people to upload or download footage, but not deletion rights. If they need something deleted, they would have to reach out to you. You would need to pay for the service but I would think the cost would be worth it if others could add footage you might need just cause they have saves near the footage recordings you need.
For many games there are sites where people share saves from different chapters/narrative branches, that would make your life way easier. Mass Effect has an amazing site that lets you pinpoint a very specific schedule to use: https://www.masseffectsaves.com/
That’s just one example, for a while I switched my gaming machines rather often and I could find savefiles for most games rather easily. If there wasn’t one already online, all I had to do is ask for one on a relevant forum, people who use those fan forums can often provide even a very specific savefiles.
Youtube-dl is a good tool. Also this is even less consistent than finding game-footage, but you should at least check if you could find save files online (though tread carefully of course).
Ah, there’s also save editors http://www.masseffectsaves.com/tools.php .
I upload all of my YouTube content with the Creative Commons license. It shows up in the description as:
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
So any gameplay footage you find on YouTube with that license should be safe to use (with attribution of course).
As for capturing the footage, I used to be able to get VLC to capture them, but it doesn’t seem to be working with YouTube any more. You can always go with the old fall-back of putting the video in full screen mode and screen capturing it. The Windows Game Bar does this with no qualms, and I’d imagine whatever game recording software you use would work as well.
As it turns out, (statistically) NOBODY uses CC license. (Or the page doesn’t show it. I just checked 10 different videos for the Bane boss fight in Arkham Origins, and not one showed a CC license. :(
You and I both use CC, but maybe the default YouTube setting is “MINE MINE THE PRECIOUS CONTENT NO TOUCHIE!” and most people don’t bother changing it.
Oh, yes, it is not CC by default.
It’s the old Evil Vizier thing. “Don’t you want to keep all this potential wealth, which I administer exclusively on your behalf, under my lock and key? We wouldn’t, ahh, I mean YOU wouldn’t want to disperse it to the masses, of course.”
Ah! The search filter DOES still exist. The button got dang tiny since the last time I saw it. I was able to use that to find a proper CC video. (A task made slightly confusing because YouTube sometimes lists “CC” under a video, but in that context it means “Closed Captioning”. I SWEAR this used to be easier and clearer ~6 years ago. I think YT made the site pretty by straight up removing information and features.)
Thanks to everyone who recommended youtube-dl. That thing is really nice.
Just use VLC to download YouTube videos. It’s open-source, it’s relatively straightforward to use, odds are it’s already installed on your PC.
Being strictly honest, I don’t think youtube will ever drive significant viewership here, but youtube is also has a much much larger possible viewership, and so if you are looking for a, frankly, more profitable and sustainable way to do what you do, then Youtube might be the thing to focus on, at least to focus on when it tips a certain point of viewership verse visits to your blog.
Sadly youtube is a horrible, often toxic, corporate shilling, Scam enabling, creator crushing mess too.
I would never put myself in a position where YouTube could cripple my livelihood by de-platforming me. I don’t trust them.
Now I’m wondering if some the various games-media outlets have something like this in-house. It stops being (as) expensive to run if you just need local, or at least limited-access storage.
Let’s say you run a fictional games outlet called the E-Scoopist. Shoot Guy 3: ReLoaded has just come out and you figure your writers and vloggers and such will be milking this for content for the next six to eighteen months depending on interest and controversy and so on.
Spin up a communal storage space. No doubt you already pay someone for your storage on an Enterprise plan, that’s a cost of doing business these days. Section off a chunk of that as a communal screenshot folder, and have all your people upload their screenshots, clips, Let’s Play footage, etc. to this place. While the game is still relevant, all this material stays here, but instead of deleting it when you’re done, just move it off to a quiet hard drive somewhere. Archive all the materials on a couple shoeboxes full of USB sticks or whatever.
As this thing goes, you’ve got a repository of images you can all use. When Shoot Guy 4: Rebirth comes out, whip out the drive of Shoot Guy 3 for comparison materials. Or Shoot Guy 2: The Sequel.
Guess I’m weirder than I thought, but I have over 10 years of savegame backups (probably a lot more if I were to dig up some old DVDs). If I found myself in your situation I could easily just go and replay any part of about 50 games across the last few decades.
I thought this was just one of those normal gamer things you do, but I guess it’s not.
EDIT: By the way, if you’re interested I can share a dropbox folder and you can fish out the files, maybe there’s something you might find useful one day.
Oh look — a nit!
I mean, you’ve already hacked the game to put the Virmire survivor on the Collector base. Hack yourself back to the suicide mission and swap the Shepard models!
I have never captured footage from a video game. The most I do is screenshots, which I just do with print screen, then I alt tab and paste into paint.
Let me be the fourth person to recommend youtube-dl. If you’re on Android, NewPipe works great too.
I’ve been using vGet Extension (for Chrome) to rip youtube videos for a stupidly long time. It lets you rip in the highest quality the video will play in, and the lowest, as well as just rip the video or audio tracks.
I really feel like you need save states of games so that you can load up and get that footage, obviously not a perfect solution but could be useful. I know I save like crazy especially if I think there is an important bit or cutscene coming up so that I can view it later. (I rarely do but I want to be able to go back if I want you know). I know for Dragon Age inquisition I kept hitting the 250 save limit cap (seriously why is this a thing on PC? if I want 500 different save files I should be able to have them damnit. I’m sure its a console thing or cloud storage or w/e but it bugged me). It has the advantage of save files are usually much smaller than video and you can go back and get it when needed. Plus with cloud saves you don’t have to worry about backups as much. I know in the past you could get save game files that people uploaded for all sorts of stuff. Not sure if this is as much of a thing anymore but it could be a potential solution. Just my 2 cents.
If you’re arguably doing commentary, it’s fair use. See Hughes v. Benjamin (1:17-cv-06493), in which the courts recently ruled that making a video that consisted entirely of cuts from a copyrighted work but giving it a snarky title was SO OBVIOUSLY FAIR USE that they didn’t even reach the summary judgement phase.
About the backups. A good backup system has 2 copies locally and one off-site copy.
The two local copies are easy. As ccesarano already mentioned: external hard drives are a good option. They are cheap. It’s best to take those with a hard drive as hard drives are much better for cold storage than SSDs. Also hard drives are cheaper.
The off-site backup is harder. Tremendous amounts of off-site backup storage GBs are quite expensive if they are in a server. Tape archives are supposedly quite cheap, but I don’t know how practical or accessible these are for individuals. (People at work talk about them, but I have not interacted personally with a tape archive service).
The cheapest off-site backup I have seen was a colleague of mine who stored an external hard drive in a locker at work. This way he had his off-site backup in order. This may be a bit unpractical, but if there is place where you go regularly and can store a few hard disks, you are safe from disasters at home.
Another option is buying a Synology NAS and buying one for one of your relatives too. With a DDNS service (I believe Synology provides one) you can sync them up across the internet. This requires a good internet connection in both households. This way you can also be the off-site backup for one of your relatives. This is the setup one of my relatives set up in our home. I am quite happy with it. Synology has this whole ecosystem that manages the stuff for you.
You could theoretically also invest in HP proliant micro servers and manage the sync yourself with rsync. But probably you are not interested in investing a lot of time and knowledge in setting up a server infrastructure. I have heard that bacula does a great job of automating this sort of stuff.
As ideal software for doing the copying both locally and remote I recommend rsync. It is a command line utility that only copies the stuff that has changed. This is ideal as you can always backup with the same command and rsync will make sure only the changed stuff is updated. There is probably some rsync GUI out there too.
Video data is huge so it is best to compress it as much as possible to safe space. For transcoding the program handbrake makes it really easy. Compression formats keep improving every year and handbrake provides an accessible way of using these technologies.
I forgot to mention these yesterday: FreeFileSync is an open source application that provides rsync-like functionality on Windows, Mac and Linux and comes with a GUI. You can make a backup copy in a certain way and save these settings in a settings file. FreeFileSync can be invoked from the command prompt on Windows pointing to this settings file. I have automated this in task manager for my wife, who primarily works on Windows. It also comes with a realtimesync program that I have not used. But this might be very interesting for people who want automated backups on Windows.
On Linux I use deja-dup. This is a very easy-to-use automated backup application that syncs all the selected files to a ftp or sftp (ssh) server. It automatically encrypts them using GPG and uses difftars for compression. This is very useful if you have a backup in the cloud, and you do not want the cloud provider to read your files. I think it is not particularly interesting for Shamus use case with terabytes of videos, because encrypting and difftarring takes time. But I know there are some Linux users out here that might benefit from this suggestion. If encryption and diftarring takes to much time there is always rsync, like I mentioned.
I haven’t read through all the comments to see if someone suggested that, but in case noone did – why don’t you just download other people’s save games and/or use save editors? I bet stuff like that would be available for most games
I basically play a lot of games with an audience of one sibling, which requires a lot of watching, and sometimes things don’t always work out I.e finishing a section when the other person suddenly becomes busy or unavailable.
So, for a mid-to-late section of Resident Evil 7 where manual saving was harder to find (but autosaves were abound, however I didn’t want to risk it…) I played through the section and recorded it, for the other person to watch later. It was mostly a combat section where a couple of moments might have been useful to see in terms of story. FYI this was someone watching me recording myself play a game where the character was watching their earlier actions that they had recorded through a video tape… so it was all quite meta.
This experience started a trend where we sometimes share game play videos, because perhaps one of us is too busy or too tired to watch the other person play the game at the time. Especially one that is being replayed by the other and so most of it looks the same. We sort of create Highlight Reel moments.
There is a surprising amount of self-expression in recording a game where you know another person is going to watch it. One person might be nervous to have another sit next to them and watch their session, but might not notice during recording, so it can be a way to even-out the sometimes one-sided nature of playing a game before the other person. Sometimes you can even tell what the other person was thinking at the time and it can be quite funny.
And on the subject only very-very tangentially related — since you mentioned backups — I can personally recommend Backblaze & Jottacloud for cloud backups.
I’m using them both and they both offer unlimited storage option (though Jottacloud apparently can throttle speeds past 5TB).