Persona 5 developer and publisher Atlus posted a message on its official site on Tuesday, dictating some rules about streaming and video for the game — and they’re pretty strange.
On the page titled, “A Note on Persona 5 and Streaming,” Atlus laid out rules dictating that, for example, players not post or stream any video content past the date July 7 within the game, or any videos longer than 90 minutes. The guidelines are actually similar to the rules sent out to reviewers who received the game early. The strange part is these rules aren’t generally imposed on everyday consumers after a game has released into the wild.
“Simply put, we don’t want the experience to be spoiled for people who haven’t played the game,” the post said. “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.”
More: Persona 5 review
The guidelines request that players not reveal plot spoilers or details about the endings to the game’s dungeons. To see just how similar these rules are to the ones imposed on reviewers, check out the below two excerpts. The first is from Tuesday’s post:
Please, PLEASE do not post any specific plot points or story spoilers, and only talk about the game in broad strokes. (Good example: “The game deals with dark themes right off the bat, with a lecherous teacher and other corrupted individuals.” Bad example: “Players immediately run into trouble with the pervy teacher *spoiler*, whose actions go so far as to cause *spoiler*.”)
And this one is from the reviewer guidelines (redactions by us so as to avoid spoilers):
Please PLEASE do not post any specific plot points or story spoilers, and only talk about the game in broad strokes (Good example: “The game deals with dark themes right off the bat, with a lecherous teacher and other corrupted individuals.” Bad example: “Players immediately run into trouble with the pervy teacher [redacted], whose actions go so far as to cause [redacted]”).
The post also noted that, as many players have already noticed, taking and sharing of screenshots and video clips through the PS4’s “share” button is disabled throughout the game. Lastly, it issued a warning to streamers: “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.”
That is one way to attempt to shield your fans from spoilers.
