Let's take a quick math quiz. How much money does Nintendo make from prominent YouTubers doing "Let's Play" videos that show gameplay footage of Nintendo games? Let's call that number X.

How much money will Nintendo make now that it seems to have asserted the exclusive right to the advertising revenue from those videos? We will call that Y.

Is X greater than Y? Who knows! It's impossible to know for sure. I don't know. You don't know. Not even Nintendo knows for sure. Oh, I have to imagine that Nintendo's market research folks have tried to figure it out, and might have a really good estimation of it. But they don't know. And the issue is that Nintendo might be hurting itself.

Nintendo has said that it is working with YouTube to place advertisements in front of user-created videos of Nintendo games. Nothing wrong with that per se, but what this means, as reported by the BBC among other outlets, is that YouTube video makers that used to receive revenue from their work may not get that money anymore – it might go to Nintendo instead. The BBC talks to one user, Zack Scott, who has millions upon millions of views of his gameplay videos.

At some point or another, every one of us has answered this question: "How did you hear about our product?" This is the question for anyone who's selling anything. Before someone can give you money, they first have to become aware that you exist. Zach Scott's video of Nintendo's recent game Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon has well over 300,000 views. While we at Wired do have many stories that are read by 300,000 people, my feature on Luigi's Mansion was not one of them. So a great many potential game buyers are now going to game reviewers like Zack Scott for their information.

I don't know how much money Zack Scott is making off his YouTube channel, but let's do some super-terrible back-of-the-envelope math here just so we're in the right ballpark. In March, AllThingsD said that some YouTube channels were getting, on the low end, $2.50 for every 1,000 views. Scott's channel has a total of 81,000,000 views as of today. Obviously there are a lot of other variables to consider, but just for fun let's see how much money that would be. It would be about $200,000.

Regardless of the exact number, we can guesstimate at least that the top YouTube gaming video makers are making a not-insignificant amount of money off their efforts. So let's say they will never see a dime from any video about a Nintendo game again. Will this make them far less likely to feature Nintendo games? Of course. Why not do another game instead, and make money?

So, then: Is the money Nintendo makes from players who buy their games after seeing them on these popular shows more or less than the amount it will make off revenue from these ads? Is the ad revenue worth the loss of support from extremely influential consumers – not just now, but on into the future as the influence of these new types of game videos continues to grow?

Maybe it is. But no one can say that for sure.