Persona 5 Streaming Policy Changed, Still Has Some Limitations
Atlus, the publisher of Persona 5, has amended their controversial, restrictive streaming policy. The blog spot even includes an apology to everybody who “saw the previous guidelines blog post as threatening”. Unbelievably, they seem surprised that they came under fire for their politics. And there are still some restrictions that remain.
Recently, Atlus fell into some seriously hot water for their prohibitive Persona 5 streaming guidelines. To recap quickly, you could only stream the game up until a very early point (around the first boss). At that point, the game disabled the Share button, and if you shared the material in any way, you’d get a copyright strike. Needless to say, the fans were outraged. The streaming ban did next to nothing for culling the amounts of spoilers that made their way to the Internet, because of course it didn’t.
In a recent blog post on the Atlus website, the developers issued an apology to the community. They also updated the Persona 5 streaming policy. Now, you can stream the game all the way until the in-game date of November 19th, which is when the story starts to wind up towards the climax. According to the blogpost, Atlus made this decision in order to show their community that they care about what they think, but still avoid the gravest of spoilers.
The only thing that’s baffling about the post is that the Persona 5 creators express surprise at the backlash. They can’t possibly be so out of touch with the gaming culture of today. In a world where let’s plays and Twitch streams are some of the most viewed content on the Internet, how could they have possibly not seen this coming? Their attempt at preventing spoilers is at its core noble, that’s true. However, attempting anything remotely resembling censorship on the Internet always ends in a PR nightmare. And in the end, due to the Streisand effect, they accomplished fairly little for their trouble, apart from ticking off their fanbase.
