Atlus Apologizes For Perceived Threat, Loosens Persona 5 Streaming Restrictions

Atlus has announced changes to its policy regarding Persona 5 streaming and apologized for the way it initially presented its guidelines.

Alongside the RPG's launch earlier this month, Atlus advised players to not stream past the in-game date July 7. Anyone who streamed beyond that point did so "at the risk of being issued a content ID claim or worse, a channel strike/account suspension," with an additional note stating, "You have been warned." Atlus explained this as being a measure imposed to avoid spoilers.

Today, it provided an update on the situation, saying that it didn't anticipate the negative response it received. "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," Atlus wrote on its website. "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."

It also went on to address the way in which it presented the original guidelines, stating, "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."

Meanwhile, the PS4's Share button functionality remains disabled, meaning players are unable to easily save screenshots or videos from the game.

Controversy over videos aside, the game itself is terrific, as you can read about in GameSpot's Persona 5 review.