It’s not a shock that once a huge and long-awaited game is finally released that players will be streaming their playthroughs.  Certain companies disable cutscenes while most consider it free publicity.

With a franchise like the Persona series, everyone will be expecting hundreds (maybe thousands?) of streams via the Playstation Network. However, Atlus, the company behind the Persona series, has made it quite clear that if anyone is caught streaming or sharing gameplay or screenshots, those players will have their accounts banned.

According to the company, “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.” Below are a few guidelines, verbatim, that Atlus has issued:

  • 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.

You can read the full guidelines here.

The article concludes with a warning: “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.”

On a personal note:

Atlus, the game has been out for months in Japan. Don’t you think players who want to be spoiled already know the game’s story and ending? Fans watch streams and look up content because the WANT to be spoiled. This, in my and many others opinion, is a bad move.