Release of Consumer-use Game Software Featuring Professional Baseball

Release of Consumer-use Game Software
Featuring Professional Baseball

August 29, 2002
KONAMI CORPORATION

Konami executed an agreement with the Nippon Professional Baseball Organization for professional baseball game software titles to be released after April, 2000. In accordance with the agreement, Konami was licensed the right to use various properties, such as the names of 12 professional baseball teams, the names of the teams' players, the team logotypes, the team uniforms, and the players' likenesses, pictures and animated images for the production and distribution of baseball game software.

Many companies have released professional baseball game software since April, 2000. Up until now, a total of 44 titles (5 for PCs) have been released by 13 companies since Konami executed the agreement, and the number of released titles has been increasing since April, 2000, rather than decreasing. During the first 6 months starting from April, 2000, 9 titles were released by 6 companies (6 titles from 5 companies other than Konami) making the market for professional baseball game software very competitive.

(Reference)
Record of release of professional baseball game software titles.
(Researched by Konami, excluding titles for PC)

	Number of Company	Number of Title
1997	6	10
1998	6	12
1999	7	12
2000	6	13
2001	7	16
2002 (8 months)	6	13

Konami sincerely hopes that the legal issues regarding the likenesses of professional baseball players will be satisfactorily settled between the Nippon Professional Baseball Organization and the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association as soon as possible. Konami also hopes that the game software industry as a whole can release various types of titles featuring professional baseball to meet the expectations of game software users, and hopes that will contribute to the further development of Japanese Professional Baseball.

Related Information;: The complaint filed by Japan Professional Baseball Players Association; The complaint filed by Japan Professional Baseball Players Association (2)

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