Back when Persona 5 released earlier this month, Atlus issued forth a few guidelines to people streaming the game. This was intended to keep major story points from being spoiled for fans, but many took issue with the strict guidelines.
Before reading, do keep in mind that Atlus slips some slight spoilers by mentioning when the main story starts to “gear up for the final act” so those of you who wish to avoid any kind of spoiler might be better off not reading the company’s full message.
Atlus has now sent out a change to the guidelines, as well as an apology to those out there who felt the original set instructions came off as “threatening.” Originally, streamers were asked not to show any gameplay past the 7/7 date in the game. The new date has been changed to 11/19, where the game’s main story “gears up for the final act.” However, native streaming and screenshots from the PlayStation 4 are still blocked.
Here’s Atlus’s official blog post:
“When Persona 5 launched, we put out a set of video/streaming guidelines that we hoped would limit online spoilers for fans who have yet to play the game.
To our surprise, we then saw numerous reactive news articles go up, opinion videos post, and received many emails asking us to please change our Persona 5 streaming/video policy. We recognize that our fans are the reason why the game is the major worldwide success it is, and we continue to want them to be able to enjoy the game without fear of being spoiled. However, we also heard your issues with the guidelines and have decided to revise them. Because we want to give players the most access to the game while respecting the original goal, we’re now asking players to refrain from streaming or posting video past the end of the in-game date of 11/19—when the main story gears up for the final act.
We also want to apologize to those of you who saw the previous guidelines blog post as threatening. We want to be transparent about what we do, and the reason we released the guidelines was to give streamers the right information up front. It was never our intention to threaten people with copyright strikes, but we clearly chose the wrong tone for how to communicate this.
Lastly, we want to thank our fans around the world for supporting Persona 5 and ATLUS. The game is a global success because of your passion for the series, and we’re happy that so many of you are enjoying it.”
Persona 5 is available for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.
