YouTubers Yogscast taking revenue share to promote Space Engineers

In the midst of Gamasutra investigating the ethics of game developers and publishing paying for YouTuber coverage, one of the biggest game YouTubers has announced a partnership with a dev that includes taking a share of its sales revenue for a month. The Yogscast, which has over 7 million subscribers on YouTube, will take "a small share" of the sales revenue for sandbox space game Space Engineers during July, in return offering a series of videos and Yogscast-branded items for the game. The Yogscast presenters are calling this new initiative "YogDiscovery," and the team says this is the first of a series of paid partnerships with devs, "giving developers a chance to reach a big and engaged audience of gamers." The YouTubers were keen to stress that "Keen Software will have no editorial influence on any content broadcast on Yogscast channels." In an open letter on Reddit, Yogcast's Mark Turpin explained that YouTubers are currently motivated to create videos about games that are already popular, in a bid to receive the most revenue. This new initiative should negate the financial risk, he claims. "This also allows smaller companies - who lack the big marketing budgets that the larger publishers have - to reach larger audiences without any risk or loss of earnings," he adds. As Gamasutra discovered earlier this month, disclosure of payments from developers must be present within the video itself.