Reports of progress already surfacing

The fighting game community has greatly enjoyed the relatively newfound wonders of live streaming as the FGC the world over can watch just about everything from major events to weekly locals from almost anywhere else on the planet.

As is virtually always the case when something nice and new comes along, there are those that abuse the freedoms of live streams by ripping content and posting on their own channels for the sake of monetization.

As a result the streamers that spend many hours and many financial resources find themselves in a situation where their YouTube video replays don't garner as much attention as they should because their content is immediately made available by pirates.

One of the fighting game community's most prominent streamers, Arturo Sanchez, has expressed discontent with such practices over the years, and has recently brought the matter up on his Twitter so as to garner more public attention.

Below is an example of such goings on highlighted in a less than happy tweet by Arturo. Pirates took the VODs from some of the Dragon Ball FighterZ action at Canada Cup, (which is still in progress as of the writing of this article) made their own YouTube videos and spread them on Reddit. Click the thumbnail here to see Art's tweet:

Since that post r/dragonballfighterz has reportedly removed all stickies of pirated content. We reached out to Sanchez who offered the following statement on the matter.

Art's Statement Hey EventHubs, this is Arturo Sanchez of Team Spooky with a message for the EventHubs community. We have been broadcasting content exclusively for the FGC on Twitch/JustinTV since 2011 and would love to keep doing it! Unfortunately there is a rampant problem in the streaming space where YouTube channels consistently reupload official tournament VOD's from various tournaments across the world. While we want the FGC to grow, this hurts content creators putting on these events for a few reasons: 1) Metrics. In order for the FGC to grow and to get outside entities to invest in the space, we definitely need to prove to them that metrics matter and the community is worth investing in. We all know the FGC is small in the grand scheme of things compared to eSports as a whole but I still believe there is a ton of value in our niche community. If someone pirates a official VOD and gets a TON of views, we definitely cannot use these on metrics to sponsors and that hurts the community in a few subtle ways (one way being investment in the space.) 2) Stifles growth of new and up and coming/midtier streamers If you've noticed, in the FGC there are very few up and coming tournament streamers and a lot of mid tier streamers quit. The only people that stay around are large channels and streams ran by the FGC developers themselves. This is in large part due to streamers not being able to monetize their YouTube channels and it hurts their wallet. They are unable to make their money back and quit streaming. I've seen this happen far too many times to count. While YouTube is not the only way for a streamer to make money this directly hurts their pocket. 3) Top players are affected by this too. This does not only affect streamers (which spend a lot of money out of pocket traveling and reinvesting in equipment.) It hurts the top player with a small 50-100 viewer stream on Twitch as well. There are YouTube reuploaders that will sit in small streams of top players personal streams and get 100k+ views earning money while the top player does not get compensated for their work at all. How is this even fair? Thanks for taking the time to read this. I love the FGC and I love giving you guys free content and I always want it to be sustainable for everyone. Much love to the community.

Sanchez is currently handling the streaming duties at Canada Cup Master Series, and you can support event organizer Lap Chi Duong by checking out the videos on Canada Cup Gaming.

Here's the Ultra Street Fighter 4 Grand Finals set between FOX|Justin Wong and EG|ChrisG, commentated by FOX|Punk and EG|Ricki Ortiz:

EventHubs has had a policy for the last several years of avoiding videos of stream rips, and only trying to post videos from the content creators themselves. Outside of some highlights and compilations.