ATLUS Blocking P5 Streams

I think I may have talked about this when Persona 5 first got released in Japan where I discovered that you cannot stream Persona 5 AT ALL past the opening scene.  The entire game is blocked for streaming directly from PS4 and there were rumblings about people using capture cards and the like having their shit taken down and whatnot.

Well I was hoping that this was because ATLUS wanted to keep a sort of air of mystery around the title until it got the worldwide release and that the block on streaming would be lifted after the western release.  Well that was nothing but wishful thinking because the English language version of the game was released recently but the game is still blocked.

Not only is it still blocked but ATLUS have released a bunch of fucking guidelines on what you can and cannot do.  Here it is

http://atlus.com/note-persona-5-streaming/

Now I love ATLUS, and I've loved ATLUS for as long as I can remember but this is complete and utter bullshit on a level that I can't quite comprehend.  The logic is that Persona 5 is a "Japanese game with a single playthrough story" so they don't want you streaming it/making videos of it so that people don't get spoiled.  You ARE allowed to stream/share up to the first major boss fight but after that you risk getting content ID strikes on your account.

Now I'm aware it's their game and they are well within their rights to do whatever the fuck they want with it but issuing such heavy punishments for anyone trying to share their experience with the game is just stupid.  If it was just a case of taking a video down, having that content they don't want removed then fine but trying to ruin someones ENTIRE channel or stream just because they showed a bit of the game past the first major story arc is just mean spirited.

Also the argument that it's to avoid people getting spoiled is the flat out stupidest thing I've ever heard.  I'm going to do an entire post on what I think about spoilers at a later date but if you're stupid enough to catch spoilers for a fucking niche JRPG then maybe you shouldn't be using a computer.  If someone is dumb enough to go into a Twitch stream for P5 or watch a YouTube video of a playthrough and then gets mad when they walk face first into a spoiler then that's their own fucking fault.  Also, being 70 hours in, I don't really see how you could deliver a spoiler in a quick simple sentence that would catch someone out like that, there's A LOT of explaining to be done behind each plot point.

Because of all these bullshit guidelines my head is filled with horrible ideas such as going on the ATLUS USA Facebook page and sending PMs to anyone who comments on P5 shit with major story spoilers or recording key cutscenes on my phone in short clips and spamming them on twitter.  The reality is I would never do anything like that really because I still quite like ATLUS and P5 is one of the best RPGs EVER FUCKING MADE that I feel that everyone should at experience and I wouldn't ever want to remove the impact of some of those key scenes.

Avoiding spoilers for anything is the easiest thing in the goddamn world and I can't help but feel this overly controlling attitude of ATLUS may sour the opinion of some people.  Personally though, despite this bullshit I find it hard to stay mad at the company that gave us SMT, Trauma Centre, Etrian Odyssey and many other heavy hits.  I guess I'm a little bit of a fanboy in that regard.

Gaming and Social Media

The fact that gaming and social media have sort of come together in recent years is such a strange phenomena to me.  Back in my younger years if I shared gaming related things on my Facebook wall then I would be ridiculed for being a loser but now I have game systems that let me, at the push of a button, upload screenshots, videos or even put out links to my Stream direct to Facebook and other platforms.

Allow me to share a little story about my first experiences putting gaming content on social media platforms.  A long while ago I used to play a lot of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on my PSP, it was a grand old time.  Just when I was starting out, I managed to grind enough of a certain creature in order to get my first full, self crafted armor set so I was pretty excited.  I thought I'd share this excitement with some of my so called "friends" on Facebook so I snapped a picture, uploaded it and put a caption on it like "woo! first proper armor!".  The comments that I got back were things like "holy shit you're such a loser" or my personal favorite "there's casual, hardcore and sad.  Guess which one you are".  THEN fast forward to 2016 where I can smash a button and upload a screenshot from Bloodborne where I just killed a boss or something and suddenly the comments are things like "well done that game is hard" or "omg I wanna play that game so bad".

This is just one example of that happening but it happened many times more and with other titles.  If you were to go through my old photo albums and look at the screen shots for Left4Dead, Guild Wars or Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine then you'll see a lot of abuse but viewing similar content on newer titles or even posts for this blog clearly shows that gaming content has become a lot more "acceptable" on social media.

Gaming platforms have always had their social elements to them with things like Steam offering ways to share pictures or content with other players but with that it's always self contained within it's own community of gamers.  Facebook is where a lot of the filthy non-players reside, the kind of people who don't understand games and think they are either for kids or for lonely, fat basement dwellers with nothing better to do with their lives so the fact that people now are willing to more openly share their gaming experiences is a bit of a shock, but a good kind of shock.

This improving of the relationship of social media and video games is something we all frowned upon back during the launch of the next gen systems.  You had people on stages at press conferences harping on and on and on about social media this and Twitter that and we just turned up our noses and said "where are the games?".  However we now live in an age where there's a large number of people working within gaming media who are trying to smear and shame it.  Lot's of articles about gamers and games being sexist or violent.  It's stuff that happened before but now it's coming from within.  Except what these social media features allow us to do is show the people directly, the people who don't know any better and would buy into this shit otherwise, that this just isn't the case.  We have been given the tools to fight back against the clickbait, sensationalist bullshit that would seek to damage gaming for a fast profit rather than help us evolve the medium.

Times have changed drastically and I'm actually rather thankful for it.

PS4 Blocked Scenes

You may be aware that the PS4 has an in built streaming feature.  By pressing the "Share" button on the controller you can immediately.  For people like me who are too broke to buy a capture card and too lazy to set it up properly even if I did, this feature is really cool.  As you may also be aware, I've been slowly working my way through the entire Final Fantasy series on my stream.

So one viewer has very kindly been donating to charity for the No Yojimbo donation incentive, which would force me to kill all the secret bosses legit instead of just paying for a Zanmato and this of course sparked a conversation about which version of Final Fantasy X I'm going to run.  The original Japanese release is out of the question because that version didn't have the dark aeon stuff so its either International on PS2 or FFX/X-2 HD for PS4 and I'm leaning towards the latter.

Except there's a problem and that's blocked cut scenes.  The only game I've streamed from my PS4 ever is Bloodborne so I've not encountered this issue but apparently some games have blocked scenes in them.  So when you reach that scene, the PS4 cuts the video feed to your stream and only you can see it.  I think the idea is to prevent spoilers or to get around copyright problems with music or some shit but either way this whole thing is complete bullshit.

Let's take it from the spoilers angle first because this makes no fucking sense.  I get that companies don't want people spoiling a new game because it may ruin the experience or may even lose them a sale if the person who got spoiled decides not to buy the game after hearing them.  But then again, why the fuck would anyone watch a stream for a game that they don't want spoiled?  Are they fucking stupid?  Not only that but it doesn't even come close to solving the spoiler issues because the player still saw those spoilers and there isn't anything stopping him from going on one of the many social media outlets and writing them all over the place for the world to see.

Then there's the issue of copyright which is a little more serious but ultimately still complete bullshit.  Check out my Silent Hill speed run from a while back

 Notice something about this video?  NO FUCKING AUDIO.  That's because there's apparently some kind of copyright issue with the song in the opening which caused Twitch to MUTE THE WHOLE FUCKING THING, yes I'm upset.  Anyway the point is that Twitch does this on an automated system so there isn't any need to block the video footage and disrupt the whole scene because of copyrights on the sound.  If they KNOW there's an issue with copyrighting within a given scene and can block the scene, why can't they just mute the audio.  Tell the PS4 to mute the mic and mute the game sound or something, sure but at least keep the video footage up because subjecting people to a few minutes of black screen for no real reason is complete shit.

Anyway, with that in mind I'm leaning towards playing X-X2 HD on PC instead but I'm a little worried about that because my computer is a great honking piece of shit  and if that version doesn't run properly that means I'm gonna have to buy it AGAIN on PS4 and just have to deal with black screen blocked bullshit during certain scenes.  Nothing is ever fucking easy is it?