Atlus has had a change of heart over Persona 5 streaming

Following the release of Persona 5 in North America, and other territories outside of Japan, Atlus posted some streaming guidelines for consumers. They were widely reported on for being weirdly restrictive.

Well, Atlus has now posted another, shorter blog post on the matter, and they’ve decided to back off a bit, though not entirely. You can now stream Persona 5 up until the in-game date of 11/19, November 19, rather than the original restriction to July 7. The 90 minute restriction has also been lifted.

The blog post clarifies the decision:

‘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 5streaming/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.’

Atlus also addresses the issue of players facing content claims or having their channels suspended for streaming.

‘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.’

The previous tone included the phrase ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’ so you can sort of see why people got the wrong end of the stick there.

Preventing everyone who has the game streaming what they like of it still feels basically unenforceable in this, the age of the internet. As we previously pointed out, there are full playthroughs of the original Japanese version to be found, too. 

Atlus does, however, thank  the fans for their ‘passion for the series’. Persona 5 was indeed a notable success.