Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment will make the licensed music in its upcoming game Quantum Break optional, to make it easier for people to post videos or streams of themselves playing the game on services like YouTube without running afoul of automated coypright protection schemes.
It's a sign of the times, as the rise of the YouTuber in recent years has driven many developers to rethink how games could (or should) be designed to be played in front of an audience on services like Twitch or YouTube.
There's also been a concomitant rise in game videos being flagged for copyright infringement (which is different from a DMCA takedown) on those services, often do to the use of licensed music in games. Engadget reports that Remedy heard complaints from people who had videos of themselves playing its 2010 game Alan Wake taken down from YouTube due to its use of copyrighted music, and added an option to Quantum Break to disable all copyrighted music.
"At a very late stage in the development of Quantum Break, we came up with the idea of giving the option to disable licensed music to make life a bit easier for everyone wanting to share their Quantum Break experience," Remedy representative Thomas Puha told Engadget, adding that "streaming and YouTube especially have become such an essential part of gaming culture these days."
As Engadget notes, this is not the first time a developer has designed a game to be YouTuber-friendly, but it's still rare to see a big-budget studio like Remedy make these sorts of changes.