At the beginning of the month, Persona 5 publisher Atlus announced strict guidelines for streamers, saying they could not stream past the in-game date of July 7, and anyone who did could be issued a content ID claim or a channel strike/account suspension.
In a new streaming update this week, Atlus said they were surprised by the negative reaction to their guidelines, and only created them to limit online spoilers. After going through all of the feedback, Atlus has now changed their guidelines and anyone can stream/post videos up to the in-game date of November 19.
You can read their full statement below (spoiler ahead!), which also includes an apology to anyone who felt the previous guidelines were threatening:
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 5 streaming/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. 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.
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.
Lastly, we want to thank our fans around the world for supporting Persona 5 and Atlus. The game is a global success because of your passion for the series, and we’re happy that so many of you are enjoying it.
In a follow-up with Eurogamer, Atlus confirmed that everything up to the in-game date of November 19 can be streamed, and the 90-minute time limit has been removed as well.
Atlus didn’t say if they’d be unblocking Share features on PlayStation 4.
Persona 5 has moved more than 1.5 million copies so far, and you can read our review over here.
