Valve Is Not Interested In Machinima

Here is a direct quote from Valve:

"We are not interested in licensing our technology or IP for machinima. This includes providing copyright approvals."

Well, that about says it all. Valve has no interest in machinima. It is really unfortunate because the Source Engine is so amazing and they offer such great tools for creating machinima.

What does this mean for Source Engine machinima? Probably nothing. Most people will continue to do what they do until they are told directly not to do it. But this does change things for those of us who look beyond YouTube popularity as what we want to achieve.

Source Engine can make amazing machinima. However, you cannot do much with it other than put it on YouTube, hope for a lot of views and then maybe hope that those views lead to somebody taking interest in you.

And what if they do take interest in you, then what? You can't actually use the Source Engine to make anything for anybody to use. Even joining some festivals will prove risky because some ask for extensive copyright permissions. This means YouTube Partner and Revenue Sharing is out of the question as well. I still have no idea how machinima.com does it and Valve would not comment on the subject.

I don't want to give the wrong idea and make it sound like we are giving up Source Engine machinima after our first try or anything. We still love the engine and the machinima that comes out of it and of course still have Shelf Life chapters to work on, we just feel very disappointed in Valve and the lack of interest they have in machinima. There is clearly no real future with Valve or Source Engine machinima other than personal projects free to the community.

This may lead to people moving away from Source Engine machinima and toward alternatives with licensing options. We were just given the iClone software that looked great already but sounds even better now that we know where Valve stands on machinima. Who knows what else we will look into, Source Engine is all we have known up until now.

Well, that's the news from the Valve vs. Machinima front. Thought it might be interesting to some of you.

YouTube Partner Experiment

Since we first started created machinima using the Source Engine we began sending emails to Valve trying to clarify their stance on machinima and copyright issues.

We have sent multiple emails multiple times to every email address we could find on their website and...nothing. Never any response of any kind after months and months and many emails.

Well, to be completely truthful we did get a response two times. Both times is was an auto-generated response about how Valve is not able to respond to all their emails, or I guess you could read in that "Valve does not respond to any emails ever, but thanks for using our email links anyway!".

OK, so we tried, and tried. We described exactly what we were doing since the beginning and told them we wanted to be in festivals and other competitions and so on and although we see a lot of machinima out there doing the same we have never officially heard from Valve on the matter.

Now a new situation has come up in that YouTube has extended an offer of partnership for revenue sharing on at least one of our videos. So what do we do? Once again we dash off an email to Valve first thing to every one of their contact emails informing them of our offer and asking for confirmation that they are OK with the program. Guess what we found out...nothing.

So, I guess we take the plunge and hope for the best. Machinima is all over YouTube and is not being taken down. Machinima.com has a partnership with YouTube and they show Source Engine machinima and I have not heard of Valve complaining. And since all of our story line, characters, voice acting and music is original we are about as clean on the copyright front as a machinima could possibly be.

Once we push the accept button on the program we enter a waiting phase where either the program will be initiated on our video or one day it will just be deleted from YouTube.

Oh well, we don't have much of a choice but to find out first hand since Valve won't comment on the issue. I can't imagine there would be a problem with this but just thought I would share so if our video does disappear you know why.

Wish us luck! :)