Sony blocks archiving of Until Dawn Twitch streams through PS4

If you want to catch your favorite Twitch personality playing through Sony's recent horror title Until Dawn, you may need to make time to catch them playing live. Twitch confirmed late yesterday that "the publisher has disabled archiving for this game," meaning that live gameplay shared on Twitch through the PS4's built-in Share button will not be permanently saved for later viewing. "We're reaching out to hopefully enable," Twitch said.

Sony didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter, but the blocked archival only really makes sense as a way to stop the spread of spoilers for the game. That's a somewhat legitimate concern from Sony's point of view, as Until Dawn's story-heavy and action-light gameplay make it the kind of game many people might want to watch online rather than shelling out money to actually play. Our own review copy of the game came packed with a lengthy list of story moments that we were asked to avoid spoiling in our pre-release review (not that we would do such a thing, in any case).

As a spoiler-prevention measure, though, blocking Share button archival on Twitch seems laughably ineffective. Players can still stream the game through an external game capture device and do whatever they like with the resulting video. A quick search of YouTube shows dozens of gameplay snippets, walkthroughs, and "Let's Play" commentaries, including a few lengthy playthroughs that were streamed live through the new YouTube Gaming service. While watching these videos robs the viewer of the story choices that are so important to the game's outcome, there are enough different playthroughs out there that a determined viewer could piece together the branching paths if they wanted.