Slashdot Mirror
Take Two Lands Exclusive MLB Deal
The deal reported last week on Slashdot has come to fruition: Take Two interactive and MLB have signed an exclusivity deal. Worthplaying has the news. "The innovative seven-year arrangement will dramatically limit the number of baseball video game manufacturers and ensure aggressive marketing and promotion of baseball video games, while promoting competition in the marketplace to drive innovation in baseball product development. Beginning in 2006, Take2 will have exclusive rights among third-party publishers to develop and market simulation, arcade and manager-style baseball video games..."
MLB and the NFL may be hurting their popularity by doing this. All the companies left out of their exclusive deals aren't going to just let their game engines go to waste. Within the next few years we are probably going to see more NCAA games. Many people prefer watching the unpaid college athletes over the professionals anyway and these excluseive deals will make college sports more popular... it's free publicity for the NCAA.
In many years of playing baseball games I've grown weary of them altogether. Seems that major improvements have been made in gameplay and graphics, but the games still have a boring aspect to them - nothing really new. At least the football/basketball games incorporate different play options, Helmet-cams and enabled rough-housing.
Maybe if the stadium is in Liberty City and we have to run from the cops while running the bases it'll be a bit more entertaining... Who knows though.
Of course, maybe they'll surprise me and resurrect baseball gaming once again.
People were bitching at EA for picking up the NFL exclusivity contract and talking about its unfairness to Sega. Yet, here is Take Two (who distributes Sega sports) doing the same thing. Moreover, Take Two tried to do the same NFL exclusive contract as EA got, they just bid less than EA. So are people starting letter writing campaigns into Sega?
As an interesting sidenote, the EA-NFL contract was completely exclusive. But here, it seems that first-party studios are not barred from making MLB games. I wonder if Microsoft put too much into buying the High Heat franchise to let that go?
I can understand why the exclusive deal makes sense from Take 2's perspective. Can someone explain to me how MLB would make more money licensing ONE company to do games than it would licensing MANY companies to do games?
I don't think Take 2 alone could give MLB more money than, say, MS, EA, Vivendi, etc combined all doing their own licensed games.
Its competition that makes the company strive for excellence.
No, it's competition that makes the company strive for first-to-market. Excellence is expensive and time consuming. Making an "excellent" product is a last resort for marketers when price, promotion, and hollow features don't win the market share they were looking for. That is, excellence is for people who *know* they won't make it to the market first, no matter what, but still want to compete.
Don't believe that excellence is lower on the list of priorities? If you think about it, the fact that game companies are competing over big-dollar major league exclusivity rights shows how much just slapping "Major League Baseball" or "National Basketball League" or "National Football League" on your game does to improve sales. If someone came up with *the* best baseball video game (whatever you imagine that to be) with fictional teams and players, how do you think its sales would compare to an inferior game with Major League teams and players?
Guess I woke up on the cynical side of the bed this morning...
This is an impending disaster for the gaming marketplace.
First it was EA with the NFL license. We know why they did it: the ESPN line of games was eating into their profits bigtime, and had exposed the fact that $20 for a barely updated annual game is more than enough to charge.
2003
Madden sales 5,000,000
ESPN sales 450,000
2004 (through Nov)
Madden sales 3,000,000
ESPN sales 2,000,000
Now Take 2 tries to counter EA by inking this deal.
This is a horrible trend and I don't see it being reversed unless consumers vote with their wallets.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
I'm pretty sure it's just the players/teams/stadiums that are licensed here. I think EA should create a baseball game with all their licenced football players and teams. NFLB 2005 - The Off-Season.
I just hope this brings about the return of the greatest baseball game ever Base Wars