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Take-Two Cements MLB Rights
GamesIndustry.biz has a story on Take-Two interactive and their efforts to tighten up agreements with Major League Baseball. From the article: "As with the MLBPA deal, the new arrangement gives Take Two exclusive rights among third party publishers only..but a loophole identified by many analysts has been sealed up, with third party publishers prohibited from developing and releasing titles in partnership with the platform holders."
I don't normally follow sports games, so I didn't really think there were than many MLB games available. So this really couldn't have been that bad a deal? Wrong. Just a quick look at Gamecube baseball titles shows we've got baseball games from Acclaim (All Star Baseball), Infogrames (backyard baseball), Sega (home run king), Midway (MLB slugfest) and MVP Baseball (EA). 5 different developers, not one of which is Nintendo. This'll get paired down to 1 developer next year. That is a big blow to innovation/competition.
Interesting thing about these games, is that there's not a single non-MLB licensed baseball game available for the GC. One of the counter arguments is that locking up MLB (or any other sports association), frees other developers to be more independent. However, the lack of non-name brand sports games indicates that there really isn't much of a market for non-League games.
Although to be fair, there are 2 non-NBA games (one by disney) and 2 non-NFL games (disney + an ncaa game) out there (but one can't honestly expect the disney games to appeal to adults). So in all the currently available sports games for the 3 big sports, there's really only 2 that don't involve a national professional league. I guess that makes your choice a bit easier.
The same things are being said now about this deal that were said of the EA deal. That is, the consumer loses on this deal. The anger and outrage isn't there for a few reasons. In no specific order.
First, Take-Two does not have a history of buying up all of its competitors. That made EA's buy of the NFL license an extesion of its "buy all developers so there's no competition" scheme.
Second, when the NFL made 300 million from the deal I'm sure every other sports enterprise wanted some so the smaller sports will probably start trying to find a buyer.
Third, if Take-Two didn't buy it then EA would have. Should they sit back and let EA suck up all the sports games?
Fourth, Take-Two's deal leaves console maker's to develop there own game. That means Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft can make MLB games. Can they do that for NFL games? Take-Two didn't eliminate all competiton like EA.
And fifth, I think all the anger was spent when EA bought the NFL license. Deals like this are going to be expected from now on. EA's deal desensitized us. The group outrage is spent so all we can do is sigh.