Persona 5 has made history by becoming the first Atlus game to hit the number one spot on the UK sales charts, although exact sales figures were not given. For the week ending April 8, the JRPG took the top spot, with Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands coming in second, LEGO Worlds coming in third, and despite being out for more than three years, Grand Theft Auto V coming in fourth.
Although this is clearly a huge achievement for Atlus, Persona 5 was actually published by Deep Silver in the UK. That’s because Atlus, who are owned by Sega, don’t have a European branch, so they need to recruit other publishers to release their games over here. Persona is pretty much their only franchise that’s popular (but not huge) in the west, which explains why they made those weird fighting and rhyme spin-offs. It’s also worth noting that in addition to the PS4 version, Persona 5 was also released on PS3, making it one of the very last games to be released on an eighth generation system.
Despite all the great publicity that Persona 5’s been receiving, Altus also found themselves becoming the laughing stock of the gaming community after they warned YouTubers not to upload footage of certain sections of the game. This announcement was released on the company’s US website, and the wording seemed to suggest that the decision was made by the Japanese executives, with the US staff not being in agreement. Although they were explicit in warning that they might attempt to suspend channels that stream the prohibited content, because making threats against your audience will surely win you a ton of respect and admiration.
Similar to the appalling Nintendo Creators Program, it seems that Japanese gaming companies still don’t understand the value of encourage YouTubers to stream their games, probably because the YouTube gaming community isn’t as big in Japan as it is overseas.
I could talk all day about how encouraging streaming on YouTube actually strengthens game sales and prohibiting it does the opposite, but clearly Atlus aren’t ready to listen. Just like Nintendo never listened. Hell, US publisher Devolver Digital even took to Twitter to mock the insane restrictions that Atlus had placed on Persona 5, and the results were pretty damn hilarious.
Streaming Guidelines for Devolver Games:
1) spoil it real hard
2) must smile
3) if you fail verbally blame your poor skills and not the game pic.twitter.com/rPVkyKmXEe— Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) April 4, 2017
I don’t think I need to tell you to go out and buy Persona 5, but I will anyway. Go out and buy Persona 5. Not only is it a fantastic game, but I for one an tired of seeing sports titles, shooters, and the usual mainstream fare dominating the number one spots on sales charts. It’s time for some of the more obscure titles to have their day in the sun.
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