Update: Matt Kim of USgamer reached out to Patreon, and received their response to the DMCA claim:
“As a platform, we respect rights holders’ intellectual property. We try to balance that with a review process to make sure complaints are not overly broad. In this case we believed the underlying purpose of the creator to be legal and worked with the rights holder to find a solution. Based on our conversations with Altus, we believe an acceptable solution has been reached. If Atlus has further concerns, we would continue our conversation with them to try and reach a fair solution that respects their rights while otherwise allowing for a legal use of Patreon.”
Earlier users noticed that all references to Persona 5 were removed from the website of PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3. This led many to speculate that Atlus was taking action against the emulator, which maintains a popular Patreon account and has made the ability to play Persona 5 on PC one of its main draws in attracting patrons. Now Atlus has confirmed that is indeed the case, and that they’ve issued a DMCA takedown notice.
Here’s the full message that Atlus posted on their website regarding the RPCS3 Persona 5 takedown:
You might have heard earlier today that we issued a DMCA takedown notice involving emulation developer group RPCS3 and their Patreon page. Yes, it’s true. We settled upon this action for two reasons:
- We believe that our fans best experience our titles (like Persona 5) on the actual platforms for which they are developed. We don’t want their first experiences to be framerate drops, or crashes, or other issues that can crop up in emulation that we have not personally overseen. We understand that many Persona fans would love to see a PC version. And while we don’t have anything to announce today, we are listening! For now, the best way to experience Persona 5 is on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3.
- We appreciate the awareness generated by the emulation community for Persona 5 and know that it is a fantastic example of how much people are loving our game. We want to keep bringing you titles like Persona 5. Unfortunately, when our content is illegally circumvented and potentially made available for free, in a format we do not think delivers the experience and quality we intend, it undermines our ability to do so by diverting potential support from new audiences.
We want to continue having a dialogue about where and how you would like to play our games. Please let us know what you think.
Atlus are well within their rights to protect their games (although we’ll see if they can do anything beyond getting references of their title removed from the emulator’s site), and it’s certainly good that they’re listening to fans who want to play Persona 5 on PC. Could a Persona 5 PC port be on the way? Only time will tell.
[Source: Atlus]
