Atlus Doesn't Want you to Spoil Persona 5 in a Stream

I mentioned the other day that the Share feature for the JRPG hit Persona 5 would be disabled at the developer’s behest. The developer itself, Atlus, said that they did that to keep people from spoiling the story, which, you know, fair enough: but then I made the assentation that Atlus probably wouldn’t waste its time chasing after people who used third-party streaming software to capture and share their gameplay.

Boy, was I wrong. As it turns out, Atlus is dead serious about making sure as many people as they can go into the game as spoiler-free as possible, because they just issued a large list of guidelines of what you can or can’t do when streaming a playthrough of their game.

"Simply put, we don't want the experience to be spoiled for people who haven't played the game. Our fans have waited years for the game to come out and we really want to make sure they can experience it fully as a totally new adventure."

So what kind of rules will you have to abide by? The list is… expansive.

• You can post however many additional videos you'd like, but please limit each to be at most 90 minutes long.
• No major story spoilers, and I'll leave that up to your good judgment. If you need some guidelines, avoid showing/spoiling the ending segments of the first three palaces. While you can show initial interactions with Yusuke, avoid his awakening scene, and that whole deal about THE painting. Also, don't post anything about a certain student investigator.
• I know I mentioned not showing the end of each palace, but you can grab footage from the Kamoshida boss fight. However, don't capture video from the other major boss fights.
• Must not focus solely on cutscenes/animated scenes, should prominently feature dungeon crawling/spending time in Tokyo.
• You can post straight gameplay or have commentary.
Streaming Content
This being a Japanese title with a single-playthrough story means our masters in Japan are very wary about it. Sharing is currently blocked through the native PS4 UI. However, if you do plan on streaming, video guidelines above apply except length. If you decide to stream past 7/7 (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT DOING THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED), you do so at the risk of being issued a content ID claim or worse, a channel strike/account suspension.

This is hardly the first time a game developer has gone after channels for streaming content: in fact, it was a subject we spoke about in my last op-ed. But this is the first time in recent memory where the stated goal of that mission was “spoiler warnings.”

So, be warned, streamers and YouTubers: don’t go crazy…