Remember when Nintendo took a huge cut of YouTubers’ money?
For three years, Nintendo ran a program that forced creators to hand over a chunk of their ad revenue just to post Mario videos, and banned livestreaming entirely. It backfired. Here’s the story of the Nintendo Creators Program, and how punishing YouTubers may have pushed them toward indie hits like FNAF.
There was a time, not that long ago, when making a YouTube video about a Nintendo game meant handing Nintendo a big slice of your earnings, if you were even allowed to monetize it at all.
It was called the Nintendo Creators Program, and it’s remembered as one of the most creator-hostile moves a game company ever made. Here’s the story of how it worked, why it backfired, and how it may have quietly helped push YouTubers toward indie games like Five Nights at Freddy’s.
What the Creators Program was
Let’s start with how this actually worked, because it was as bad as it sounds.
Nintendo has always been aggressive about copyright, quick to claim or strike YouTube videos using its games. In 2015, it launched the Nintendo Creators Program (NCP) as its “solution”: instead of striking your video, Nintendo would let you monetize it, in exchange for a cut of the money.
The terms were rough. Nintendo took 40% of the ad revenue from individual videos, or 30% if you ran a whole channel dedicated to Nintendo. And here’s the kicker: that cut came after YouTube already took its own roughly 45%. So a creator was left with only about a third of the original ad money on their own video. Nintendo and the platform pocketed the rest.
It got worse than just the money
The revenue split wasn’t even the most hated part.
The program came loaded with restrictions. Creators had to submit each Nintendo video for approval before it could be monetized, a slow, gatekept process. Only officially released games and footage were allowed. And most damaging of all: livestreaming Nintendo games for money was banned entirely.
That last one mattered enormously, because live streaming was exploding as a format. A creator who built their channel on live play simply couldn’t do it with Nintendo games and earn anything. Even PewDiePie, then the biggest creator on the platform, publicly ripped the program, pointing out that Nintendo was throwing away the free marketing that YouTubers gave its games.
Why it was such a bad deal
Step back and the whole thing looks self-defeating.
When someone plays your game on YouTube, they’re advertising it for free to millions of potential buyers. Most companies want that. Nintendo’s program treated that free promotion as something to tax and control instead, making creators jump through hoops and surrender income for the privilege of promoting Nintendo’s products.
For a creator deciding what to play, the calculation was simple. Cover a Nintendo game and deal with approvals, restrictions, no livestreams, and a 30-40% tax. Or cover almost anything else and keep your money and your freedom. Nintendo made itself the most annoying possible option.
Where creators went instead: indie games
Here’s the part that connects to one of the biggest gaming stories of the decade.
While Nintendo was busy taxing and restricting creators, indie developers were doing the exact opposite, actively welcoming Let’s Plays and streams, because they desperately needed the exposure and couldn’t buy marketing any other way. For a YouTuber, indie games were a dream: free to cover, no legal hassle, no revenue cut, and grateful developers.
This dynamic is widely credited as a real force behind the indie-gaming boom on YouTube. As one analysis of the era put it, because of the threat of copyright strikes, many Let’s Players “hung their hats on indie games that could benefit from the publicity, as opposed to AAA studios, like the notoriously litigious Nintendo.” Creators followed the path of least resistance, and that path led straight to indies.
Enter Five Nights at Freddy’s
No game captures this better than Five Nights at Freddy’s.
FNAF launched in 2014, a cheap, scary indie horror game made by one person, Scott Cawthon. It became a YouTube phenomenon almost overnight, thanks to creators like Markiplier and MatPat, whose over-the-top scared reactions and deep dives into the game’s hidden lore turned it into must-watch content. Markiplier’s first FNAF video has since racked up over 127 million views.
FNAF was perfect Let’s Play fuel: scary, funny to react to, full of mystery, and crucially, an indie game that welcomed the coverage rather than punishing it. Creators could play it freely, keep all their (non-Nintendo) earnings, livestream it, and build entire channels around it. A whole generation of horror-game content, and careers, grew out of exactly that freedom.
To be clear, FNAF didn’t blow up solely because of Nintendo’s policies, the game’s own clever design and those viral reactions were the engine. But the broader pattern is real: when the biggest name in gaming made itself hostile to creators, those creators poured their energy into the games that rolled out the welcome mat. Indie horror was a huge beneficiary.
How it ended
The good news is that Nintendo eventually saw sense.
After three years of criticism, Nintendo shut down the Creators Program in late 2018, with the website going dark in March 2019. In its place came a simple set of guidelines: as long as creators add their own commentary and follow basic rules, Nintendo would no longer claim their revenue or require approval. Livestreaming Nintendo games for money was finally allowed.
It was a near-total reversal, and an admission that the original program was a mistake. Today, you can stream and monetize Mario and Zelda content freely, the way you always should have been able to.
The lasting lesson
Here’s what the whole saga taught the industry.
The Nintendo Creators Program is a case study in how not to treat the people promoting your product for free. By trying to squeeze and control creators, Nintendo didn’t make more money, it mostly made creators avoid its games and pour their talent into the indie titles that treated them as partners.
Those indie developers got a generation of free, passionate promotion that helped build hits and franchises. Nintendo got three years of bad press and a program it had to kill. The creators, in the end, voted with their controllers, and a lot of them ended up at Freddy Fazbear’s instead of the Mushroom Kingdom. Sometimes the smartest business move is just getting out of the way and letting people love your stuff out loud.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
Tubefilter (2018-2024), verified for the Nintendo Creators Program 40%/30% revenue splits, the after-YouTube’s-45%-cut math, the per-video approval requirement, the livestream-monetization ban, the 2015 launch, and the 2018 shutdown with March 2019 website closure
Variety and Kotaku (2018), verified for the program’s revenue-split structure, the shutdown announcement, the replacement guidelines requiring commentary, and the livestreaming allowance
T.L. Bodine and FNAF Insider (2023), verified for the dynamic of Let’s Players favoring indie games over “notoriously litigious” AAA studios like Nintendo, and the role of Markiplier and MatPat in FNAF’s YouTube-driven rise
Wikipedia (2026), verified for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2014 release and YouTube-driven success, Markiplier’s 127-million-view FNAF video, and the PewDiePie criticism of the Creators Program