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Atlus Moves Back Persona Streaming Cutoff Date, Still Restricting In-Game Sharing
Right before Persona 5 launched at the beginning of the month, Atlus USA issued a stern warning to streamers: Stream past a certain in-game date, and there'll be trouble. Also, don't bother using that Share button. Though it's not quite taking the leash off streamers, Atlus updated its guidelines, loosening some of its restrictions.
The company has announced in a blog post it's pushing the no-streaming date from 7/7 in the game's calendar to 11/29, which, according to Atlus, is "when the main story gears up for the final act." Atlus also made sure to call out the negative response to the initial date as the impetus for the change, but reiterated its main goal is letting players avoid spoilers. To that end, it doesn't look like it's lifting the in-system sharing restrictions for screenshots and videos.
Finally, the company also wanted to walk back the tone of its initial post. "We also want to apologize to those of you who saw the previous guidelines blog post as threatening," the blog post states. "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."
Our Take
I'm willing to bet they were going to move the date back at some point, and that the tone of the response is the only thing the negative feedback affected. That said, I'm still a little upset they haven't lifted the in-game sharing restrictions. I'm still seeing lots of images and videos for later portions of the game, only they're off-screen and a little blurry. All these restrictions do is make it harder for people to latch onto the game, and I can't think of many instances where I've been spoiled on a game through Twitter alone. Also, not letting people stream the game natively means only those with third-party hardware will be able to show the game to others, which seems like a strange restriction.
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