If you are making YouTube videos about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you may want to think carefully about the type of videos you are uploading.

This all began on 21st of March, when we started seeing videos about a newly-discovered duplication glitch being passed around. Evidently, Nintendo was not happy about this.

Videos affected

Note that all of these videos have been removed. I bet the actual list is much longer, but this is what I found.

Due to its impact on the in-game economy and the fact Nintendo is attempting to remove instructions for how to perform this glitch from the internet, I will not be linking to any instructions that are still live.

In addition to this, GameXplain‘s video, Item Cloning Glitch Discovered in Animal Crossing: New Horizons! (Make 100k+ Bells in Minutes), has been removed by themselves. It is most likely their video was also blocked, at which point they deleted it, but this is unconfirmed. When its watch page was accessed by the Wayback Machine on 22 March at 20:18 UTC, the video had accumulated 102,878 views.

A futile battle

At present, there are still many videos available, detailing the bug. I will not be contributing to this, at least not until it’s patched. It is simply impossible for Nintendo to remove all videos on the topic, and even more challenging for them to do anything about instructions hosted outside of YouTube.

In spite of this, I strongly discourage you from uploading any exploitative glitch YouTube videos about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or any Nintendo game, for that matter. These appear to be worldwide blocks, rather than copyright takedowns, so it doesn’t appear anyone received a copyright strike. Nonetheless, playing with fire remains not worthwhile.

Is this abuse of the copyright system?

Every time something like this happens, people seem to point the finger at companies allegedly abusing YouTube’s copyright system. I am not going to get deep into legal stuff in this article, but rest assured that video game companies have every legal right to remove video uploads of their games. The main exception would be if footage is used solely for review or criticism, which isn’t applicable in this case.