Atlus Warns Persona 5 Streamers, Provides Guidelines For Video And Streaming

Today in a blog post pub­lish­er Atlus set guide­lines for all who stream or cre­ate video con­tent for the recent­ly released Per­sona 5.

It has already been known that the native PS4 share options (screen­shots, video, and stream­ing) are dis­abled for Per­sona 5. Now the pub­lish­er is set­ting guide­lines for any­one who cre­ates con­tent about the game or cap­tures game footage using an exter­nal device. 

They state that any dis­cus­sion about the game should be done broad­ly and not men­tion spe­cif­ic plot points. A good exam­ple pro­vid­ed by Atlus is “The game deals with dark themes right off the bat, with a lech­er­ous teacher and oth­er cor­rupt­ed indi­vid­u­als”. While a bad exam­ple would be men­tion­ing exact­ly what that teacher did and what it led to. 

For video con­tent they gave the fol­low­ing guidelines:

• You can post how­ev­er many addi­tion­al videos you’d like, but please lim­it each to be at most 90 min­utes long.
• No major sto­ry spoil­ers, and I’ll leave that up to your good judg­ment. If you need some guide­lines, avoid showing/spoiling the end­ing seg­ments of the first three palaces. While you can show ini­tial inter­ac­tions with Yusuke, avoid his awak­en­ing scene, and that whole deal about THE paint­ing. Also, don’t post any­thing about a cer­tain stu­dent investigator.
• I know I men­tioned not show­ing the end of each palace, but you can grab footage from the Kamoshi­da boss fight. How­ev­er, don’t cap­ture video from the oth­er major boss fights.
• Must not focus sole­ly on cutscenes/animated scenes, should promi­nent­ly fea­ture dun­geon crawling/spending time in Tokyo.
• You can post straight game­play or have commentary.

In regards to stream­ing, Atlus stat­ed that they do not want any­one to stream past the in-game date of 7/7 and warn any­one who does may be issued a con­tent ID claim, chan­nel strike or account sus­pen­sion. Here are their exact words with­out any changes to format:

“If you decide to stream past 7/7 (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT DOING THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED), you do so at the risk of being issued a con­tent ID claim or worse, a chan­nel strike/account sus­pen­sion.”

Accord­ing to Atlus, the rea­son­ing behind these actions is that Per­sona 5 is a very sto­ry focused game that many have been wait­ing for since 2013 and video/streaming con­tent may ruin the experience. 

Despite the harsh pol­i­cy, Atlus does seem will­ing to change and may not apply the same guide­lines to oth­er games. “Per­sona 5 is a super spe­cial case for us and we’re in ongo­ing dis­cus­sion about how our poli­cies may evolve in the future.”

Giv­en the high­ly neg­a­tive reac­tion on twit­ter and the ongo­ing neg­a­tiv­i­ty sur­round­ing sim­i­lar pol­i­cy from game com­pa­nies like Nin­ten­do expect to hear more on this sto­ry. This goes dou­bly so if they fol­low through with enforcement.