Atlus USA recently issued a DMCA takedown notice against Nekotekina, the developers of a PS3 emulator RPCS3, and their Patreon page.
While there aren’t any copyright laws being broken in the development of the PS3 emulator RPCS3, the reason Atlus USA got involved was because the RPCS3 Patreon page had updates showing progress of the emulator and how far it can play Persona 5 on PC.
The RPCS3 Team shared Atlus USA’s message to Patreon on Reddit, which requested the crowd-funding platform to remove the Patreon page for the emulator’s development:
“The PS3 emulator itself is not infringing on our copyrights and trademarks; however, no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable”
Patreon declined to remove the emulator’s page, as they believed that the page itself did not specifically infringe on intellectual properties, to which Atlus responded “We kindly ask that you remove both for this reason – to make Persona 5 work on the emulator, the user has to circumvent our DRM protections.”
The RPCS3 Team was advised by Patreon to remove all Persona 5 references from the project’s crowd-funding page, which has since then been updated accordingly without a single mention of the Atlus RPG title.
Atlus USA issued the following statement on the matter:
You might have heard earlier today that we issued a DMCA takedown notice involving emulation developer group RPCS3 and their Patreon page. Yes, it’s true. We settled upon this action for two reasons:
- We believe that our fans best experience our titles (like Persona 5) on the actual platforms for which they are developed. We don’t want their first experiences to be framerate drops, or crashes, or other issues that can crop up in emulation that we have not personally overseen. We understand that many Persona fans would love to see a PC version. And while we don’t have anything to announce today, we are listening! For now, the best way to experience Persona 5 is on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3.
- We appreciate the awareness generated by the emulation community for Persona 5 and know that it is a fantastic example of how much people are loving our game. We want to keep bringing you titles like Persona 5. Unfortunately, when our content is illegally circumvented and potentially made available for free, in a format we do not think delivers the experience and quality we intend, it undermines our ability to do so by diverting potential support from new audiences.
We want to continue having a dialogue about where and how you would like to play our games. Please let us know what you think.
